Hyperion Records

Der traurige Mönch (Ballade von Nicolaus Lenau) (‘The Sad Monk’) is the first intimation that Liszt gives us of the direction of the music of his old age: much of this piece, which is famous to musicologists if not familiar to audiences, is built entirely on whole-tone scales and harmonies (this two years before the birth of Debussy), and its other harmonic vocabulary makes much unsettling use of the augmented triad. Although the final cadences give us something like a cadence into C minor, ending on a first inversion chord, this piece is truly atonal – something which Liszt would not approach again until his very late works – and provides an accompaniment which far outstrips Lenau’s poem in its intensity.

from notes by Leslie Howard © 1996