ANALYSIS OF TONAL EXPANSION IN LISZT’S LA LUGUBRE GONDOLA

Abstract

The last 15 piano works of Franz Liszt, written during the last five years of his life (1881-1886), have fascinated musicians for their harmonic radical, often associated with prophetic harmonic procedures, including building the music on unresolved dissonant relationships, ambiguous chromatic harmonic progressions, slow-moving ostinato patterns without clear musical direction, lean and quiet textures, tremolos, many silences that interrupt the progress of the music, and monophonic recitatives. These 15 works illustrate Liszt’s experimental style at its most extreme associated with macabre/death, bizarre, and dreamlike. Historians have attributed to Liszt morbid obsession of death, starting from the passings of his two children in 1860s, and continuing with series of depressing events to his death. Specifically, four of them are related to the death of Richard Wagner (his son-in-law), including La lugubre gondola I and II, Am Grabe Richard Wagner, and R.W. – Venezia. Much of this music are articulated by various negative fantasy through within limited or lack tonal focus; hence, Liszt wrote these works clearly to the approaching exhaustion of tonality, foreshadowing sounds associated with the early twentieth century especially in the music of Debussy and Schoenberg. The purpose of this writing is to analyze the two numbers of La lugubre gondolas and evaluate the harmonic writings, in which Liszt pointed out the music to the approaching exhaustion of tonality.