Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and the Emergence of Multi-Level Form

Date of Award

Fall 2022

Document Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Music

First Advisor

Cohn, Richard

Abstract

How can the form of Franz Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 be understood? Associated with his earlier Piano Sonata’s (1853) revolutionary formal innovations—known as “double function form” (Newman, 1969) or “multi-level form” here—the answer has eluded analysis since before its first publication in 1861. This dissertation continues the search by developing methods to analyze it and reconstructing the musical, music-theoretical, and historical-contextual trends surrounding the original 1839 version, which is here published in critical and performance editions for the first time. The dissertation begins with an initial analysis of both versions of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2, highlighting the challenges faced in trying to understand its form, which chapters 2 through 5 develop the contexts and tools to bridge. Chapter 2 explores music theory treatises and musical criticism journalism around 1840 for theories of the so-called “virtuoso” concerto form and related genres. The T-S-C diagram is developed in chapter 3 as a method to analyze what is argued to be concertos’ most salient parameter to listeners of the time, while the accompanying Appendix A applies it to a corpus study of 100 concertos between 1815 and 1845, from which it gains statistical insights. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to introducing multi-level form and exploring its emergence across ten key works from the corpus, respectively. The dissertation ends with a re-analysis of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 2 that synthesizes all the insights gained to revisit—and answer—the opening question.

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