On the rare occasion that a work of tonal music doesn’t end on a tonic chord, it usually comes as a great surprise. Such instances are few and far between: Schubert’s Ganymede ends in a different key from the one in which it began, and so does the slow movement of Brahms’s F minor piano sonata, Op. […]

In the last three entries I dealt with Brahms’s Op. 76 cycle, a quintessentially anti-programmatic work, propelled solely by its own development and needing no extramusical content to accompany it. The subject of this post, Suisse, Liszt’s first volume of Années de pèlerinage, is the polar opposite of that.  When I first came to study in London […]