Piano Sonata in B minor, S. 178

The Liszt B minor Sonata is a single movement that lasts close to thirty minutes, and in that span it asks more of the performer — and the listener — than almost any other piece in the solo piano repertoire. It opens with a kind of primordial gesture: low rumbling octaves descending the keyboard, then a strange, lurching theme that seems to be testing the ground before it stands. What follows defies easy description because the sonata is, in effect, an entire dramatic work compressed into one continuous arc — it contains its own exposition, development, and recapitulation, its own scherzo, its own slow movement, all woven together seamlessly so that the piece feels both free and rigorously organized. The emotional range is staggering: passages of demonic ferocity give way to moments of unearthly stillness, thundering octave passages resolve into singing cantabile lines of heartbreaking tenderness. Liszt was working at the absolute edge of what was technically possible at the piano in 1853, and even now the Sonata sounds radical, harmonically restless, structurally unbound. There's a recurring motif associated with Faust and Mephistopheles in musicological readings, and whether or not you follow that narrative, the sense of a soul navigating between grandeur and collapse is insistent. This is music to listen to completely, in darkness, without interruption.