Totentanz (Liszt)
Totentanz (Dance of Death. Paraphrase on "Dies irae" for Pianoforte and Orchestra, S.126) is the name of a symphonic piece for solo piano and orchestra by Franz Liszt (1849), which is notable for being based on the Gregorian plainchant melody Dies Irae as well as for daring stylistic innovations.
Obsession with Death
Some of the titles of Liszt’s pieces, such as Totentanz, Funérailles, La Lugubre gondola, Pensée des morts, cause us to suspect that the composer was fascinated with death. In the young Liszt we can already observe manifestations of his obsession with death, with religion, with heaven and hell: Liszt was an enthusiastic Catholic, and he devoured Dante’s Divine Comedy. In the early 1830s he is reported to have frequented Parisian "hospitals, gambling casinos and asylums," and he even went down into prison dungeons in order to see those condemned to die.
In no way though is this obsession with death an isolated phenomenon in European culture.
The traumatic impact of the Black Death inspired a rich tradition of "Totentanz," "Danse Macabre," or "Triumph of Death," paintings and since the Middle Ages, throughout the Renaissance until today painters, such as Bosch, Brueghel, Holbein and many others, have ritually cleansed our subconscious of this archetypal fear with fantastic, sometimes humorously horrible, images of dancing corpses and armies of skeletons. Those images contained a morale message as well: they were to remind us of how fragile our bodies were and how vain the glories of earthly life are.
Sources of Inspiration
In the Romantic ages, due to a fascination with everything Medieval, the aspect of fantastic or grotesquely macabre irony seemed to have replaced the original moral intent. A musical example of such irony can be found in the last movement of the Symphonie fantastique by Hector Berlioz which quotes the medieval (Gregorian) Dies Irae (Day of Judgment) melody in a shockingly modernistic manner. In 1830 Liszt attended the first performance of Berlioz’s Fantastic Symphony and was struck by the powerful originality of this work. Since Liszt’s Totentanz (Dance of Death), a set of variations for piano and orchestra, is also paraphrasing the Dies Irae plainsong, it is generally believed that he must have received the inspiration from Berlioz.
Another source of inspiration for the young Liszt may have been Francesco Traini’s famous fresco "Triumph of Death" in the Campo Santo, Pisa. Liszt had eloped to Italy with his mistress, the Countess d’Agoult, and in 1838 he visited Pisa. Only ten years later, Liszt’s first sketches materialized into a complete version of his Totentanz. Revisions followed in 1853 and 1859, and its final form was first performed at The Hague on 15 April 1865 by Liszt’s student Hans von Bülow, to whom the work is dedicated.
Stylistic Innovations
Since it is based on Gregorian material, Liszt’s Totentanz contains Medieval sounding passages with canonic counterpoint, but by far the most innovative aspect of the scoring is the shockingly modernistic, even percussive, nature of the piano part. The opening comes surprisingly close to the introduction in Bartók’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, a work composed almost a hundred years later. This may be no coincidence since Bartók (as well as Rachmaninov) frequently performed Liszt’s Totentanz. Other modernistic features are the toccata like sections where the pianist’s repeated notes bleat with diabolic intensity and special sound effects in the orchestra—for example, the col legno in the strings sound like shuddering or clanking bones. Richard Pohl (an early biographer) notes, "Every variation discloses some new character—the earnest man, the flighty youth, the scornful doubter, the prayerful monk, the daring soldier, the tender maiden, the playful child."
Extant Versions
Like most Liszt pieces, a number of versions exist. Besides the first version of the Totentanz a De Profundis version has been prepared from manuscript sources by Ferruccio Busoni (1919). The standard version is the final third version of the piece. Besides these a two piano as well as a solo piano version by Liszt can be found.
Notable Performers
Besides the performances by Hans von Bülow, Bartók, Rachmaninov and Busoni, performances of historic significance include those of the Liszt student José Vianna da Motta (1945 - Port Nat S IPL 108), as well as György Cziffra (EMI 74012 2), Jorge Bolet (Decca) and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli (1961 - Arkadia HP 507.1; 1962 - Memoria 999-001).