Franz Liszt and his 'Trois odes funebres': A philosophy of music, art, and literature (Hungary)

This thesis provides a critical analysis of Franz Liszt's Trois odes funebres in light of the composer's philosophy of programmatic music.; Liszt utilized Lamennais's poem in the score of Les morts and composed music that embodied the preacher persona and reflected a movement from fear to confidence by means of shifting musical elements.; In La notte Liszt employed the thinker persona of his piano solo, Il penseroso. By utilizing a quotation from Virgil's Aeneid with a Magyar cadence, Liszt created a fictitious past for himself, thus identifying his fictitious self as the persona.; Liszt attached a passage from Serassi's biography of Torquato Tasso to the third ode, Le Triomphe funebre du Tasse. Liszt disregarded the traditional roles of functional tonality to prolong the listener's realization that tonic is not what one first thinks it is, an experience much like those realizing Tasso's greatness only after his death.