Historical background for a hermeneutic interpretation of the Liszt B Minor Piano Sonata as the metaphysical embodiment of his spirit

In order to comprehend and appreciate the life force of Liszt's B Minor Piano Sonata (1853), this treatise is based upon historical data, and juxtaposes a hermeneutic interpretation (the Verstehen of the interpreter's inward response to the Sonata) with the analytical Erklaren that provides an outward explication of its material content. One must comprehend the whole context in order to appreciate the Sonata's beauty, for as a poetic work of art, the Sonata embodies Liszt's feeling and thought into a sensual mold that preserves and communicates his original sense and content as composer and as "Man." Liszt's original sense and content have been interpreted to be Faustian/autobiographic (as he identified strongly with the Faust legend) and Biblical (as his Catholic faith was the foundation for his own identity as "Man"). Both analogies are true, for each interpretation is based upon the metaphysical battle of good vs. evil, and because Liszt's concepts of God and Satan/Mephisto were internalized parts of his own identity as "Man." Liszt internalizes the collective ontological experience of the "ego" vs. the "non-ego" within his own individual Romantic experience that comprises varying identities of the ego, wherein his self-realization as the lonely protagonist of "Man"--be he Faust, be he Liszt--determines the novel form of this Sonata. Respecting Lisztian priorities, that a Romantic person senses truth before he knows the truth, the presentation of this study emerges from the foundation of the Sonata's historiography which provides an understanding of the work's symbolic meaning before the technical analysis explicates the intervallic structural content of Liszt's multifunctional tonal language that directs this complex musical form. This heterogeneous tonal language has been described in terms of intertonality and ultramodality (Lajos Bardos), and as successive polymodality (Lajos Zeke). The scale-motive's identity is allowed free emotional metamorphosis during the formal process of "multifunctional variation." The scale-motive transforms within both the temporal scheme of thematic presentation and the spacial scheme of tonal structure (Lajos Zeke). In the Sonata, diatonicism functions together with intertonality and ultramodality within the process of successive polymodality (which equates chromatic alterations of a tone, as scale degrees are unfixed). Through metamorphosis, the opening scale transforms within these systems of intervallic organization to direct the architectonics of this harmonic drama. This author sees this Sonata as an organic amalgamation of many contrasting tonal elements that Liszt internalized in his synthetic unity of consciousness in order to poetically express his own metaphysical embodiment.