The author aims to make an “analysis for a virtual performance” in order to be prepared for Riccardo Risaliti’s real performance, so that her discussion can be labelled under the category of “analysis for listening”.
The paper is devoted to a reconstruction of Simon Boccanegra’s image in Liszt’s Réminiscences on the basis of musical topoi well known to the audience, who is able to identify them and interpret them in a coherent plot. The musical topoi capable of connecting together the three main episodes of Liszt’s piece are: the rhythm of the funeral march, the recitativo on the same pitch and the “figure of death”, present in Verdi’s opera but transformed by Liszt in a new light. The similarities and the differences between Verdi’s score and Liszt’s paraphrase are described and interpreted in order to sketch the “new” image of the protagonist.