Bad star!

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Bad star! Sinistre, disastro is a piano piece by Franz Liszt . It belongs to his late work and therefore shows harmonics and tonal language that are otherwise untypical for Liszt . The date of creation is uncertain, but is usually dated to 1886, the year Liszt died. Liszt describes, as the name suggests, an eerie, gloomy and catastrophic mood that manifests itself primarily in dissonances .

music

Liszt leaves in Unstern! the typical customs of romanticism . The chords no longer serve to harmonize a melody, but rather to create timbres. The musical material is partly strongly reduced, on the border to atonality and includes the tritone as well as the excessive triad and various other dissonances. Liszt's work thus appears to be ahead of its time and is reminiscent of the musical gestures of coming epochs, especially Anton Webern's music and expressionism .

The piece begins in the Lento with a melody line in the bass register, which mainly contains two tritoni and is repeated. It sounds twice as a sequence, transposed up by a fourth . There are breaks in between. From bar 21, G sharp octaves begin in the right hand, while an octave movement begins soon after in the left hand. In bar 25 there is a steady, four-bar chord change between an excessive and a minor chord. The last scheme appears again, transposed one semitone upwards. As a dramatization of the action, the A sharp and then the B octaves are provided with a similar octave countermovement, the chord part in between is omitted, instead a multiple sounding, dissonant chord is set at the end of the part, which ends in a G aug 7 chord without a fundamental note , which are opposed to the bass octave. In bar 52 the right hand stops, the left begins a wave-like up and down movement.

The “calamity” slowly reaches its climax: over an F octave tremolo, which acts like an organ point , an excessive triad chord is shifted chromatically upwards over the range of two octaves, beginning in the piano, which finally ends in fortississimo on a C aug chord . This is taken over and repeated over and over, while dissonant chords containing mainly tritoni are opposed to it in the bass. Finally, from bar 84, a homophonic, organ-like chord passage follows, which contains more consonant harmonies than before. From bar 101 the movement becomes more polyphonic, with chromatic upward and downward movements inserted twice . Then an initially chromatic bass line is decorated with some dissonant, later consonant chords. The piece ends with a line of individual, long bass notes.

literature

  • Ben Arnold: The Liszt Companion . Greenwood Publishing Group, 2002, ISBN 978-0313306891 , pp. 168f.

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