THE GREATEST SHOWMAN

Liszt defined musical glamour. But pianists now see substance behind the spectacle.

- ALEX ROSS

My high-school piano teacher, Denning Barnes, liked to assign me pieces that I had no hope of being able to play. The idea was to experience the music from within, however pitiful the results. One day, he placed in front of me the score of Franz Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor—a deceptively thin document of thirty-five pages. By the middle of the second page, I was floundering, but I had already received a constructive shock. Liszt was hailed in his lifetime as the demigod of the piano, the virtuoso idol who occasioned mass fainting spells, and in the hundred and thirty-seven years since his death no one has challenged his preëminence. Yet the Sonata begins with seven bars of technically unchallenging music, which anyone who reads notation can manage. The intellectual challenge is another matter.

You first encounter two clipped G’s on the lower end of the piano, spread across two octaves. Liszt indicated that these notes should sound like muffled thumps on the timpani. You then play a slowly descending Gminor scale, doubled at the octave. The second and seventh degrees are lowered a half step, meaning that the scale assumes the contour of the Phrygian mode, which medieval theorists considered mystical in character. (The Hindustani raga known as Bhairavi, which is associated with tranquil devotion, is similar in shape.) Liszt’s scale, though, has an unmistakably gloomy aspect, its downward trudge recalling the passage to the dungeon in Beethoven’s “Fidelio.” We are in an echt-Romantic realm—sombre, religiose, remote, forbidding. “Abandon all hope” could be written above this Phrygian, Stygian staircase. Faust might be brooding in his laboratory; Byron might be dreaming of death and darkness.