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In the present essay twelve letters by the Roman student of Liszt, Pietro Boccaccini, are quoted in their entirety. They were written between August 1875 and December 1877 and addressed to his friend and pianist, Maria Giuli in Rome. The corpus of letters herein transcribed is kept at the Post-Unity Historic Archive of the National Academy of Santa Cecilia in Rome. The analysis of this unpublished correspondence has led to new starting points of investigation into the biography of the Roman musician, providing more details about his life and at the same time indirectly enlightening the figure of Maria Giuli, herself a pupil of Liszt’s in Rome.

These missives depict a specific moment of Boccacini’s life, precisely the years he spent in South Italy while perfecting his piano expertise under the guidance of Beniamino Cesi. The main topic of this correspondence is, in fact, Boccaccini’s frantic attempt to attain a solid piano technique.

A deeper between-the-lines reading of these letters also allows considerations on what the relationship might have been between the Master, Liszt, and the student Boccacini: it provides hints that unfortunately are not validated in the collection of letters by Liszt and yet it urges a more thorough research on a chapter of the life of Liszt, during his stay in Rome, very poorly investigated till now.

The autograph collection of the Fondazione Istituto Liszt includes two unpublished short letters by George Sand. They are transcribed here for the first time. The first one is undated and addressed to an anonymous recipient. It is simply a proposal for an appointment. The second one is more interesting because it was written in La Spezia on May 4, 1855, near the end of Sand’s second (and last) journey to Italy. It is addressed to her friend Étienne Arago, a French politician who was then in exile in Turin. Sand proposes to him to come to La Spezia (which will not happen) and refers in a postscript to their meeting with the Italian politician and publicist Lorenzo Valerio, that took place in Genoa at the beginning of her trip.

As such, this second letter gives us the opportunity to add some details about the meeting that occurred in Genoa and the one anticipated in La Spezia, and to transcribe the unpublished letter Arago sent to Sand, again on May 4, a letter which complements the correspondence between Sand and Arago during her journey.

The paper compares some compositional techniques in Liszt with those in late Skrjabin, using a neo-Riemannian perspective. In particular, a study is made of Listz’s use of some families of chords, referred to as Weitzmann Regions, whose members are linked by parsimonious voice-leading. On this basis the paper talks about the Consolation n. 2, involving two tonal centers recalling the opposition between the main and subordinate tonalities in functional syntax. Furthermore, taking into account an interest in Greek music and its particular device known as metabolè, the paper points out a distinctive feature in Lisztian works: the re-reading of the same structure with minimal inflections of voices. In this perspective we can consider the several presentations of the opening theme in the B-minor Sonata, as observed by Lajos Zeke. This technical device also appears in Liszt’s late music, as can be seen on analysing R. W. Venezia, whose first section shows a minimal shift from a WT1 element to a WT0 element before returning to WT1, while the middle section consists of a half RP cycle.

With this in mind, the paper examines some techniques contained in Skrjabin’s late works, where parsimonious shiftings occur between objects with higher cardinality: octatonic collections, acoustic and whole-tone scales.

In the last section some twentieth-century developments of the minimal inflection technique are investigated, focusing on several non-triadic collections as studied by J. Straus. All of this shows the achievement of a generalized technique of parsimonious hybridization: starting with symmetrical structures, gradual departures from perfect evenness arise moving to near-evenness, according to the so called fuzzy logic. Meanwhile we can observe that, as in coeval science and philosophy, the focus is moved to transformations rather than to the objects themselves.

We publish here the manuscript of All’amica lontana, pensiero patetico op. 16 by Adolfo Fumagalli kept in the archive of the Fondazione Istituto Liszt. The piece was composed in March 1848 in Turin, where the pianist was living for a while in Maestro Fabbrica’s house, after finishing his studies at the Milan Conservatory the year before. At the end of March of the same year he was back in Milan, and in August  he decided to go once again to Turin and then to Paris, where he arrived only one year later, in March 1849. There, after a very hard start, he was finally acclaimed as «the Paganini of the piano» some years after. In this small salon piece we find all of Fumagalli’s technical skills, including a clever way to avoid the risk of repetitions in the ABA form basically constructed of phrases of 4 measures long.

The paper presents an unpublished letter of Liszt to his best student, Sophie Menter, probably dating back to January 16, 1881, and reconstructs the context. In the paper are cited the well-known librarian and musicologist Francesco Florimo, Liberato Aureli, Liszt’s waiter, and Maria Giuli, another pupil of Liszt and niece of Giovanni Pacini, about whom the author has already published unknown documents in this same journal (2013).

In his account of the «second age of the symphony» James Hepokoski (2002) classifies the orchestral compositions of British composers Charles Villiers Stanford and Hubert Parry as «nationalistic» works that exoticise, but otherwise uphold, Austro-German models. This perpetuates the traditional view of a nineteenth-century British symphonic tradition failing to uphold the criterion of originality central to nationalism and to the symphony’s «second age» generally. Closer scrutiny of the symphonies of Stanford and Parry reveals complex syntheses of traditionalistic and modernistic strains: both composers negotiated the conflicting imperatives of experimentation, originality and linguistic approachability that confronted the full range of symphonists of all nations – including Franz Liszt. Several of Stanford’s symphonies contain programmatic elements and inter-movemental, “cyclical” processes that evoke the compositions of Liszt. The limited and controversial dissemination of Liszt’s orchestral music in later nineteenth-century Britain, coupled with blatant differences in stylistic orientation, obscures any path of influence running directly from Liszt to Stanford. Nonetheless, comparisons between Liszt and Stanford’s Fourth Symphony (originally prefaced by lines from Goethe’s Faust) and Sixth Symphony (a response to paintings and sculptures by George Frederick Watts) indicate that “modern” techniques inhered in works traditionally seen in a “reactionary” light. Such comparisons also point towards Liszt’s partial acceptance of traditional structuring principles, even in such apparently iconoclastic works as the Faust Symphony.

Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 17 is a puzzling miniature written towards the end of the composer’s life: much of its idiomatic material, as well as the traditional slow-fast pairing, is represented in a highly abstract way that defies generic listening. The work’s largely euphonious harmony and ambiguous genre perhaps explain why it has not fitted well into received narratives and discourses on Liszt’s late music: but it is precisely its harmonic and anti-generic aspects that deserve closer attention.

This article therefore begins by contextualizing the work as a Rhapsody and then proceeds to examine salient ways in which Liszt creates a quasi-“distancing effect” that denies listeners the pleasure of immersing themselves in exoticism, nationalism and virtuosity. The second part looks more closely at how this work avoids the affirmative affective route expected in a Rhapsody, and instead continuously transforms three idiomatic (and extremely simple) motifs in order to create something closer to a dreamlike psychological drama or even a nightmare – unlike any other Rhapsody ending in a fast tempo.

The final part examines the role tonality plays in creating this dream world; more specifically, Liszt’s cryptic key signatures and note spellings, some of which seem to go against a more intuitive perception of harmony. Two contradictory readings, employing both Neo-Riemannian and prolongational perspectives, highlight this riddle. The first demonstrates that, notwithstanding Liszt’s D minor-to-major key signatures, the work can be heard as tonally coherent when B-flat is considered to be the central sonority against a largely chromatic background. The second reading takes Liszt’s key signatures and spellings seriously and presents a tonal process that is only a fragment of a greater, imperceptible whole, much like other elements in this fascinating work.

The output of Antonio Fanna, important pianist, teacher and music promoter in Venice in the early nineteenth century, effectively sums up, as a first example in Italy, the instrumental meeting between Classicism and Romanticism. Highly esteemed by leading musicians and performers of his time, Liszt in particular, Fanna composed works which, although marked by the brilliant style and suggestions of melodrama, pursue the demands of art, revealing the composer as one of the most interesting in the development of taste and the perfection of technique. His story intertwines with the Venetian culture and patriotic fervors of Daniele Manin, with whom he associated.

This article describes in a critical manner all the sources of the song Angiolin dal biondo crin, two of which were newly discovered by the author. Very important too is the description of the order of composition of the whole set of the sources. Liszt used to revise some of his compositions many times, and the different versions of the same piece reflect his attitude to composition. According to the results of this research, the data on this song in the principal Liszt catalogues should be modified.