Barenboim plays Liszt: Piano Sonata in B minor (h-Moll Sonate)

“… it goes without saying that Franz Liszt cannot be a quiet piano player for quiet state burghers and cosy sleepyheads". This is how Heinrich Heine assesses Franz Liszt's public position. The Sonata in B minor, written in 1852/53 and considered one of Franz Liszt's major works, drew harsh criticism. Eduard Hanslick spoke defamatory of the sonata as a "genius steam mule that almost always goes empty - an almost inexecutable musical monstrosity". He had never experienced a "more refined, more impudent fusion of the most disparate elements …". The aggressiveness of this attack is treacherous. The merging of the (seemingly) incompatible, the juxtaposition of heterogeneous elements must have been deeply unsettling for the critic, who was oriented towards the ideality, unity, harmony and uniformity of the classical period. In this simultaneity of the non-simultaneous, Franz Liszt was a pioneer of modernism, in which individual elements are available and can be assembled at will. In addition, Liszt had broken with the tradition of the sonata genre by creating a single-movement work that seems to correspond to the strict sonata form only through the correspondence of expositions and recapitulation. The work dedicated to Robert Schumann, simply called "Sonata", contains no explicit programme. It has always been interpreted as a piece about the sorrowful struggle of a human soul, as an eventful path of human search, and also as an autobiographical document of Franz Liszt's struggle for truth.