The Avant-courier Of Impressionist Music

The late piano music of Liszt has many breakthroughs on the aspect of composition technic. In this paper, I choose 13 'vanward' pieces during this period and make some study and analysis on harmony, scale, tonality, texture, structure and so on. These 13 pieces are Sposalizio, Les jeux d'eaux a la Villa d'Este, Sursum corda, Abendglocken, Carillon, Csardas macabre, Nuages gris (Trube Wolken), R.W.-Venezia, Unstern, Am Grabe Richard Wagners, La lugubre gondola(2 versions), Dritter Mephisto-Walzer. According to the analysis, I relate them to Impressionist Music between the late 19^th century and the early 20^th century, and then compare them with Debussy and Ravel's piano music. At the end, I draw the conclusion that the late piano music of Liszt has a lot of resemblance and relationship with Impressionist composers' music. It mainly embodies the nontraditional harmony including general use of unsolved dissonance, continuous use of augmented triads, the chord building with fourths, a series of parallel sonorities, the use of pentatonic scale, whole-tone scale, Acoustical scale and semitonic scale, the exertion of uniform form and plenty of lasting notes etc. So we can say part of Liszt's late piano pieces foreshow the later Impressionist Music and they are avant-couriers of Impressionist Music.