Franz Liszt - Präludium und Fuge über den Namen BACH, S 260

Franz Liszt (22 October 1811 – 31 July 1886) was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, music teacher, arranger, and organist of the Romantic era. He was additionally a philanthropist, Hungarian nationalist, and Franciscan tertiary. Please support my channel on Präludium und Fuge über das Motiv . (I), for organ, S. 260i (LW E3/1) Description by Blair Johnston [-] Despite the degree to which worldly concerns and earthly delights influenced the course of Liszt’s life, the composer remained throughout his years a deeply religious man. Toward the end of his life, he took minor vows and became the Abbé Liszt, resolving an internal conflict which had long troubled him. Though remembered chiefly for his virtuosic piano compositions and innovative symphonic poems, Liszt in fact wrote almost as much sacred music as secular. His prodigious skill at the keyboard helped him to produce two major works for organ: the Fantasy and Fugue “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam“ (1862) and the Prelude and Fugue on the Name B-A-C-H (1855). While neither work is specifically sacred in content, each is nevertheless an important product of Liszt’s interest in functional church music and his corresponding affinity for the music of J.S. Bach. Written during the same decade that saw the production of such well-known works as the Piano Sonata in B minor (1852-1853) and Les préludes (1848-1854), the stunning Prelude and Fugue on the Name B-A-C-H was originally composed in 1855, though it didn’t reach its final state until 1870. Based on the motive B-A-C-H -- in German nomenclature, B flat, A, C, and B natural -- the Prelude and Fugue is Liszt’s most thoroughly chromatic essay up to that point, clearly presaging the direction that both he and countless other composers took in the following decades. Not surprisingly, the work takes Bach’s own preludes and fugues for the organ as a model. In particular, the sliding harmonies of the Fugue owe a great deal to the chromatic style of some of Bach’s works, though Liszt quite naturally takes the process several steps further than the Leipzig master, who never abandoned a sense of functional harmony. Indeed, at several points during the Fugue, built on a subject which ingeniously extends the downward semitone motion inherent in the B-A-C-H motive, it is impossible to determine a tonal center. In addition, Liszt expands the architecture of the venerable form of the fugue to an unprecedented degree; although the Prelude manipulates the four-note motive in a number of clever ways, it is in the following Fugue that the greatness of this work lies. As is typical of Liszt’s fugal works, strict imitation is summarily abandoned, and the Fugue assumes a more rhapsodic character. The four-note motive appears in yet another guise at the end of the Fugue, this time as an ostinato under a series of punctuating chords. Soon after its completion, Liszt transcribed the work for piano solo (S. 529), in which form it is today best known.