The relation between Liszt and Verdi is very long, but not continuous. Here a survey is proposed, where, in fact, a strong caesura emerges in the very middle: the paraphrases from Jerusalem to Rigoletto maintain the virtuoso imprint, which is strongly rooted in the cultural practice of the bourgeois concert. After a long rest the late Lisztian compositions on Verdi’s music follow opposite objectives and ideas. At the end of this course the Réminiscences de Boccanegra represent a diversion, not a logical conclusion, not only (or not mainly) on a technical-compositional level but in the ideal and spiritual contents.
With a superimposition of forms and conceptions, in Réminiscences de Boccanegra Liszt realizes an individual comment on Verdi’s laical spirituality, anticipated by the two previous piano transcriptions from Aida and Agnus Dei. The Doge’s blessing in the last scene of the opera is Verdi’s voice addressing a new Italy already torn by contrasts between Catholics and Liberals; Liszt clearly realizes this is the Hohepunkt of the whole drama and gives it the same central position in his Réminiscences. But while Verdi’s opera ends with this scene’s dark and ambiguous sound, Liszt repeats the opening theme at the end with an emphatic fortissimo and in the main key, achieving ideas of harmony and completeness wholly opposite to those of Verdi. Therefore with his Réminiscences the late abbé completely (and deliberately) overturns the forms and contents of the late anti-clerical Verdi and overturns his pessimistic disillusion.
The distance between the two men (not only two composers) thus becomes a symptom of a wider debate. Since this perspective is not strictly analytical, it is open to criticism as being too conservative or “continental”; but it is nevertheless worth the risk.