The article explores issues pertaining to Formenbildung and the handling of tonal organization in music of the Romantic period (including the unfolding of musical forms in time and the ambiguity of formal functions), with a particular focus on the Sonata in B minor and other works by Franz Liszt. It details the progressive emergence of the characteristics of so-called “open form” (to use the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin’s term as adapted by the Russian musicologist Inna Barsova) from middle-period works such as Vallée d’Obermann and the Sonata onwards, a tendency which reaches its apogee in late works such as the tone poem Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe and the late piano pieces. It concludes by exploring the ways in which the compositional approaches and shaping of musical time manifest in Liszt’s later music transcend the framework of Romantic poetics.