Franz Liszt - Valses Oublièes, No. 1 (Analysis)

The elderly Franz Liszt at the piano as a couple waltzes in a luminous nineteenth-century salon
In the first Valse oubliée, Liszt keeps the dance alive at the piano as the brilliance of the salon gradually recedes into memory.

At the age of seventy, one of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated pianists returned to the dance that had accompanied his youth. The waltz still moves, ornaments itself and glitters; yet every so often, the music regards it as something that already belongs to the past.

Valse oubliée No. 1 is one of the most distinctive works of Franz Liszt’s late period. Brief, elegant and still virtuosic, it brings two seemingly different musical worlds into contact: the grace of the salon waltz and the restless harmonic thought of the ageing composer. Triple metre, light-footed keyboard writing and the periodic shape of certain phrases preserve the work’s dancing ancestry, while delayed resolutions, chromatic detours and sudden changes of character continually shift its perspective. Nostalgia, irony and pianistic brilliance coexist within a few concentrated minutes.

The work’s genesis is linked to another “forgotten” piece. Late in 1880, the publisher Arnold Simon returned to Liszt the manuscript of an unpublished piano romance written in 1848 and long since forgotten by its composer. Liszt radically revised the music and called it Romance oubliée. The new version appeared in 1881 for piano and in several combinations with a string instrument. Soon afterwards, the idea of the “forgotten” turned towards another musical type inherited from the past: the waltz.

The circumstances were difficult. On 2 July 1881, Liszt fell down the stairs at his Weimar residence and was confined to bed for several weeks. On 23 July he dated the autograph manuscript of a composition then bearing the simple title Valse. No direct connection between the accident and the expressive content of the piece can be proved, yet the proximity is striking: during a period of enforced stillness, the elderly composer turned to a dance associated with movement, youth and social brilliance.

By 9 August 1881, Liszt was offering the piece to the publisher Hugo Bock under the title Vergessener Walzer – Valse oubliée. After receiving the fee he had requested, he wrote on 8 September that engraving could begin at once. Bote & Bock issued the work before the end of the year as Valse oubliée (Vergessener Walzer). The title Première Valse oubliée became established later, when this first piece was published together with its successors.

The word oubliée acquired special resonance in Liszt’s late output. It referred both to the workings of memory and to musical genres that time had pushed aside. The old romances and courtly salon waltzes he had cultivated in his youth now belonged to another aesthetic and social world. In the first Valse oubliée, Liszt recalls their melodic and rhythmic shapes while surrounding them with a harmonic language filled with non-chord tones, delayed resolutions and unexpected shifts.

Three more Valses oubliées followed. The four works were composed between 1881 and 1884 and gradually gathered under a common title, although they were not conceived from the outset as a unified cycle. The first remained the best known and the only one to secure a lasting place in the concert repertory. Here, Liszt’s old and new voices sound at once: the pianist who knew every means of enchantment, and the ageing creator who had begun to question the very mechanisms of that enchantment.

Movements / Structure

Valse oubliée No. 1 is a single span of 209 bars. Describing it as a simple ternary form, A–B–A′, captures only the broadest sense of departure and return. It misses the central formal process: material reappears in a different harmonic environment, changes expressive identity, dissolves into trills and is finally reduced to fragmentary melodic memories.

The score, read alongside Liszt’s recorded instructions to his pupils, suggests six broad regions:

1. Opening chords — bars 1–16

Pairs of short chords descend across the keyboard, creating a lively and faintly teasing opening. They act as a theatrical entrance before the dance appears and later return as a recognisable formal marker.

2. First waltz region — bars 17–48

The principal theme establishes a clear triple pulse and a more familiar dance texture. Eight-bar phrases, rocking accompaniment and the repetition of material one step higher recall the salon waltz, while wide melodic intervals and chromatic tones prevent the harmony from settling.

3. Scherzando and elegiac climax — bars 49–106

A second theme enters at bar 49 with lightness, wit and playful articulation. The music gradually expands towards the passionate outburst at bar 89, where the triple pulse remains perceptible while the line becomes more songful and elegiac.

4. Altered return — bars 107–139

The opening chords return, suggesting that the waltz is beginning again. A key-signature change from six sharps to two flats places the familiar material in a different harmonic light, while the characteristic ninth of the opening theme acquires a darker quality.

5. Trills and the dissolution of the dance — bars 140–159

Coherent phrasing gives way to repeated figures, short motions and trills. The pace quickens, the texture grows thinner and the steady impression of the waltz is swept into a brief virtuoso whirl.

6. Transformed return and coda — bars 160–209

The passionate theme from bar 89 returns softly above a flowing accompaniment of broken chords. The accompaniment gradually loses momentum, phrases contract and the music rises into the piano’s upper range. From bar 193, the texture narrows to a solitary melodic line, turning the waltz into fragments of a receding memory.

Musical Analysis

The opening chords — a theatrical entrance

The beginning is surprising because it lacks the blurred, dreamlike quality that the title might lead us to expect. Pairs of clipped chords descend with clear articulation, brevity and vitality. The silences between them intensify the sense of anticipation, as though a space were being opened in which the dance can appear.

August Göllerich’s testimony confirms that Liszt wanted the opening quite forceful, extremely short and sharply detached. This matters interpretively: the piece is not to be covered from the outset by a uniform haze of melancholy. Nostalgia will emerge through the musical journey; the beginning has nerve, elegance and a delicate sense of humour.

The same chords return at bar 107. Their recurrence creates a formal axis across the work, yet the altered harmonic surroundings make clear that return is not mere repetition. The entrance is recognisable, but the world behind it has changed.

The first theme — the dance finds its step

At bar 17, the waltz proper begins. The left hand establishes triple metre, characteristically linking the second and third beats, while the melody traces broad, supple curves. Eight-bar phrases and the repetition of much of the material one degree higher bring the periodic ease of the salon waltz.

That familiarity remains fragile. The opening melodic motion contains a wide ninth, and F-sharp major, though the fundamental tonal reference, is not immediately secure. Non-chord tones enter the harmonies, resolutions are delayed and chromatic motion leaves phrases suspended between competing directions.

Liszt warned his pupils that the first theme must not be played too slowly. An overly deliberate tempo would turn the music prematurely into lament and weaken the contrast with the later elegiac region. The theme must retain the elasticity of a real dance so that its gradual withdrawal can acquire expressive meaning.

Here lies one of the work’s central tensions: the dance is still alive, while the harmony prevents it from feeling entirely secure. Every familiar phrase already contains the element that will later transform it.

The scherzando — memory discovers humour

At bar 49 comes what Liszt himself, when teaching the work, called the “second theme”. The character changes at once: the music becomes lighter, the articulation more agile, and contrasts between legato and staccato figures create piquant, playful animation.

Liszt asked that this region be played lightly, wittily, freely and with playful grace. In another lesson he insisted that the distinction between slurred and detached notes be made clearly audible. Its humour lies in these small details, in sudden shifts of weight and in the sense that the music changes direction at the moment it seems ready to settle.

This section reveals an aspect often concealed by the poetic title. The first Valse oubliée is not an uninterrupted meditation on lost time. Its nostalgia still contains theatricality, teasing wit and self-mocking elegance, linking the ageing composer to the legendary pianist of his youth.

As the scherzando unfolds, its energy intensifies and prepares the strongest emotional outburst of the work’s first large phase. The playful material thickens until its momentum is transformed into elegiac passion.

The elegiac surge — the dance turns inward

At bar 89, the dynamic reaches fortissimo and the marking appassionato transforms the atmosphere. The melody breathes more broadly, phrases unfold with heightened feeling and the previous playfulness becomes a more sustained, songlike declaration.

Liszt described this theme as elegiac and asked that it should not “waltz” too insistently. The triple pulse remains beneath the surface, preserving the dance’s memory, while the melodic expression breaks free from its social poise and outward rotation.

The left hand still supports the motion, but attention increasingly moves to the line, its breathing and the harmonic shadows around it. The music carries the waltz into a more private space, where movement becomes a vehicle of memory.

The climax gains further significance when the same theme returns at bar 160, stripped of its former force and accompanied by gentle broken chords. Beneath the fortissimo and appassionato, an elegiac voice was already waiting to be revealed.

The altered return — the familiar in a new harmonic light

At bar 107, the opening chords return and the piece appears to begin again. Yet the change from six sharps to two flats draws the music away from the brightness of F-sharp major.

The shift even alters the theme’s characteristic interval. The major ninth of the first presentation becomes a minor ninth, allowing a single semitone to change the expressive perspective. The melodic curve remains recognisable, while its colour grows more uncertain and inward.

This reveals the economy of late Liszt. Familiar material placed in a different harmonic space is enough to create a new phase of the narrative. Return becomes distorted recollection: the basic shape survives, while its shades, intensity and emotional meaning have changed.

For this reason, a simple A–B–A′ scheme does not adequately describe the work. Every recurrence carries the memory of what has intervened.

Dissolution into trills — virtuosity changes its function

From around bar 140, coherent phrasing begins to recede. Small repeated figures fragment the earlier continuity, motion accelerates and trills increasingly occupy the texture. By bar 155, the music has moved noticeably away from the steady rhythmic foundation of the waltz.

Liszt asked his pupils for speed, abundant trilling and a further acceleration of tempo. The passage has momentum and direction: virtuoso motion draws the material towards dissolution.

For a few moments the old virtuoso returns, the pianist of speed, brilliance and lightning movement across the keyboard. Yet virtuosity has acquired a new dramatic role. Rather than driving towards triumph, it creates a brief resurgence that disassembles the dance and opens the way to the inward final region.

The transition from the trills to the return of the appassionato is especially subtle. Motion seems to exhaust itself, leaving behind gentle broken chords and a melody that has lost its former outward intensity.

The return of the appassionato — intensity becomes memory

At bar 160, the theme first heard fortissimo at bar 89 returns softly above flowing broken chords. Recognition is immediate, yet the changed dynamics and texture completely transform its character. Passionate declaration has become distance.

The accompaniment sustains a calm pulse without insisting on the dance. The melody is given room to breathe, and its elegiac nature comes to the fore. The music remembers its former climax from afar.

Phrases gradually shorten and wander into the piano’s upper range. The accompaniment loses density until its motion comes to rest on a solitary B. Music passes from lyrical fullness towards attenuation, and silence assumes an ever greater role.

This progressive stripping of texture gives the coda its expressive power. Liszt removes the elements of the waltz one by one until only its melodic shadow remains.

The coda — completion without a final display

From bar 193, the music is reduced to an unaccompanied melodic line. Small fragments move through the upper range, pauses become more palpable and the dynamic tends towards dolcissimo. Liszt wanted the closing theme to sound a little sad and full of sensitivity.

The last seventeen bars withhold the customary final chord of a salon waltz. The texture withdraws into isolated notes, yet preserves tonal orientation and recalls earlier thematic material. Near the end, the kinship between the two principal families of ideas also becomes perceptible.

The ending is therefore allusive and anti-rhetorical, without lacking formal completion. It offers thematic recognition, tonal direction and a clear expressive release, choosing a far subtler closure than the expected cadential chord.

Memory rarely returns an event in its original fullness; it keeps a phrase, a motion or a single sound. The waltz ends in precisely this way: the music has arrived, while its final image continues to recede into silence.

Harmonic Language — a tonal world in constant motion

Valse oubliée No. 1 is in F-sharp major, which remains a stable point of reference throughout the piece. Yet tonality is rarely presented as undisturbed ground. Non-chord tones enter the harmony, resolutions are delayed and chromatic shifts allow a phrase to turn just when confirmation seems imminent.

The work’s harmonic originality need not be described as a direct “prophecy of atonality”. Recognisable tonal poles remain, and the fundamental orientation can be heard until the end. Its modernity lies chiefly in the way Liszt weakens our confidence in traditional harmonic expectations.

A pitch may remain fixed while the harmony around it changes; a familiar interval returns chromatically altered; an expected resolution is delayed long enough for a chord to acquire the force of an autonomous colour. The major ninth of the opening theme becoming a minor ninth after bar 107 is exemplary: one note moves by a semitone, changing both atmosphere and harmonic relationship.

This procedure connects the waltz with the wider explorations of late Liszt. In Nuages gris, Unstern!, La lugubre gondola and later the Bagatelle sans tonalité, he would weaken traditional harmonic function more radically. The first Valse oubliée remains closer to the Romantic world, while allowing the familiar to cast an unstable and strangely modern shadow.

Pianistic Writing — virtuosity on a new scale

The work contradicts the simplistic idea that late Liszt abandoned virtuosity. Its writing includes leaps, swift runs, light staccato, trills, movement into the instrument’s upper range and sudden dynamic contrasts. Elegance and technical brilliance remain essential.

The change lies in their function. Virtuosity appears in brief, dramatically purposeful eruptions: it gives the scherzando wit and buoyancy, dissolves the stable dance in the trill passage and prepares the coda by carrying material into the upper reaches of the keyboard.

The piano continually changes roles. It begins as a theatrical narrator in clipped chords, supports the supple waltz motion, becomes witty in the scherzando, sings with elegiac intensity and turns into a virtuoso whirl. At the end, this variety contracts into one solitary melodic voice.

The journey from pianistic fullness to extreme delicacy is one of the work’s deepest organising principles. The coda is powerful because an entire world of movement, brilliance and harmonic instability has gradually contracted into a few unaccompanied notes.

The “Forgotten” as an Aesthetic Idea

The title Valse oubliée can easily be heard as the confession of an old composer remembering the dances of his youth. Nostalgia is important, yet the historical evidence and the music itself point to a more complex relationship with the past.

For Liszt in the early 1880s, oublié had begun to function almost as an aesthetic category, describing forms and genres that had lost their former social and artistic place. The salon waltz, once a sign of elegance, youth and public brilliance, had become an object of historical memory.

Liszt keeps the genre’s recognisable features: 3/4 metre, rocking accompaniment, recurring phrases, grace and pianistic ornament. Harmony, articulation and continual changes of character reveal his distance from that world. The waltz is recalled tenderly, treated with humour and finally allowed to move away.

The irony often turns towards the composer himself. After August Göllerich played the first two Valses oubliées for him, Liszt joked that they proved their composer had never attended a conservatory and knew nothing of the rules of harmony. The remark mocked the criticism directed at his late music and showed how consciously he defied established expectations.

The first Valse oubliée is therefore a dialogue between memory and historical distance, between the brilliant nineteenth-century pianist and the composer who, near the end of his life, had begun to hear that same century as something receding.

💡 Musical Insight

When Liszt taught his own “forgotten” waltz

On 18 February 1886, only months before his death, the seventy-four-year-old Franz Liszt once again sat before his pupils. The first Valse oubliée was barely five years old: recent enough for him to remember precisely the characters he had imagined, yet old enough to have begun circulating within the close world of his students.

August Göllerich was among those who observed and recorded these lessons. His notes are not a systematic treatise; they preserve brief interventions as the music sounded before Liszt—a comment on articulation, a few words about a theme, a warning about tempo. Together they reveal a composer who heard the waltz as a continuous succession of moods and reacted whenever an interpretation threatened to smooth them into sameness.

He wanted the opening chords quite loud and very short. The first theme was to move without excessive slowness so that the dance retained its vitality. At the scherzando in bar 49, the character had to change: lightness, wit, freedom and playful grace, with slurred and detached phrases clearly distinguished.

The elegiac theme then demanded an entirely different inward stance, singing without too obvious a waltz character. After bar 140, Liszt wanted speed, abundant motion and accelerating trills, as if melancholy were suddenly caught in a virtuoso whirl. From bar 193, the atmosphere changed once more: the final theme should be a little sad and sensitively played.

Read together, these directions form a miniature drama. Liszt did not ask the pianist to cover the piece in a single veil of nostalgia. He wanted the decisive entrance, dancing grace, scherzando teasing, elegiac shift, resurgence of virtuosity and sensitive withdrawal all to remain distinct. Memory continually changes tone: it smiles, recovers old energy and then pauses before something it can no longer restore whole.

Another lesson, on 10 July 1885, brings us even closer to Liszt’s view of the unusual ending. Göllerich had played the first two Valses oubliées, and when the first reached its unaccompanied coda, Liszt joked that people were never satisfied unless they heard a chord at the end. If the public wanted one so badly, he said, the pianist could add a few. He sat down and played two chords in the appropriate key.

Those chords are not in the score and were never intended as an alternative ending. Liszt was satirising the audience’s need for conventional confirmation and showing how deliberately he had chosen another kind of completion. The final line was an aesthetic decision that allowed the waltz to withdraw without the formal bow of a closing chord.

The autograph manuscript records the care he gave this ending. On its ninth page, Liszt first wrote a conclusion of 24 bars. He then cancelled it and added 50 new bars, creating the longer and far more finely shaped final trajectory we know today. This was no minor correction: it altered the scale, drama and manner of the music’s departure.

We may therefore imagine the waltz at three moments in its life: on the manuscript in 1881, as Liszt deletes an entire ending and starts again; in the lesson of 1885, as he mocks the public’s craving for a final chord; and in February 1886, as he guides his pupils from the vivid opening chords to the last sorrowful phrases.

The work is called “forgotten”, yet nothing in its creation or teaching suggests neglect. Liszt attended closely to its articulation, its changes of character and, above all, the way it would end. The forgotten waltz became one of the works through which the composer himself taught us how to remember him.

🎧 Listening Guide

The first Valse oubliée contains many changes of character within its brief span. These landmarks make its formal journey easier to follow:

The clipped opening chords
The music begins with more vitality and theatricality than the nostalgic title suggests. Their later return helps the listener hear the work’s large-scale articulation.

The waltz enters at bar 17
The left hand clarifies the triple pulse while the melody opens into wide intervals. F-sharp major provides orientation, though chromatic tones keep the harmony in motion.

Phrases repeated one degree higher
This apparently simple displacement heightens the tension and shows how Liszt transforms a brief idea without interrupting the dance.

The change of character at bar 49
The scherzando brings light, witty articulation. Contrasts between slurred and detached notes make the music seem to play with the waltz and with the listener’s expectations.

The elegiac climax at bar 89
The dynamic expands and the melody becomes passionate. The dance pulse remains underneath as expression turns inward and songful.

The opening chords return at bar 107
The new key signature and the change from major to minor ninth alter the theme’s colour, making recognition strangely unfamiliar.

The trills after bar 140
The stable image of the dance begins to break apart. Trills thicken, tempo accelerates and virtuoso motion enters the work’s most unstable region.

The quiet return of the appassionato at bar 160
The once-forceful theme returns above gentle broken chords, sounding like the memory of its former climax.

The thinning of the final seventeen bars
The accompaniment stops and a slender melodic line remains. The coda allows the dance to recede in small, unaccompanied fragments.

🎶Further Listening

The interpretive challenge lies in balancing a genuine dance pulse with the distance created by harmony, articulation and the gradual attenuation of texture. Three recordings illuminate that balance differently:

  • Vladimir Horowitz — 1985: Highly personal, rhythmically free and sharply characterised. Horowitz brings out the humour, theatricality and eccentric elegance while preserving vulnerability in the coda.
  • Leslie Howard — 1985: More restrained and structurally lucid, allowing the transformations of material to be followed with unusual clarity. Its place within Howard’s complete Liszt survey also illuminates connections with the other forgotten waltzes.
  • Stephen Hough — 2008: Transparent textures, subtle pedalling and acute attention to the exchange between elegance, irony and melancholy. Virtuosity remains light, while the ending acquires a remarkable sense of distance.

📚 Further Reading

The work gains depth when read beside sources on Liszt’s late years, records of his teaching and critical editions that reveal the revision of the musical text.

  • Alan Walker — Franz Liszt: The Final Years, 1861–1886: The fundamental biographical study of Liszt’s final decades, his changing musical language and the setting of his late piano works.
  • Mária Eckhardt — Preface to Valses oubliées, Henle Urtext HN 977: An essential concise study of the genesis, publication and aesthetic meaning of the four waltzes, including Göllerich’s records of Liszt’s teaching.
  • Ben Arnold, ed. — The Liszt Companion: Its chapter on the piano music of 1861–1886 discusses form, thematic intervals, key-signature changes and the gradual attenuation of the first waltz.
  • Klára Hamburger — “On Liszt’s Last Piano Works”: A compact account of the harmonic and formal modernity of the late piano works, with specific attention to delayed resolutions and thematic kinship in this coda.
  • August Göllerich — Franz Liszts Klavierunterricht von 1884–1886: Primary evidence for Liszt’s directions concerning articulation, tempo, thematic character and the irony of the ending.

🔗 Related Works

These works illuminate the development of Liszt’s waltz style, the dance as personal memory and its later reimagining in the early twentieth century:

  • Franz Liszt — Valse-Impromptu, S. 213: A waltz from the younger Liszt’s world, rich in outward elegance, lyrical ease and keyboard brilliance.
  • Franz Liszt — Valse oubliée No. 2, S. 215/2: The next piece moves further from an immediately recognisable waltz pulse through sharp rhythmic contrasts and unusual tonal shifts.
  • Frédéric Chopin — Waltz in A minor, Op. 34 No. 2: A melancholy transformation of social dance into inward expression, retaining clearer periodicity and formal balance.
  • Claude Debussy — La plus que lente: A later, ironically stylised view of the salon waltz, where sensual slowness and harmonic fluidity carry a subtle distance from the genre.

🎼 Closing Reflection

The waltz still remembers its grace, teasing wit, brilliance and passionate turn. Then the room empties, the accompaniment falls silent and a single slender voice remains at the piano.

The last dancer has gone; for a little longer, the music remembers.

📖 References & Sources

This revision draws on Liszt’s autograph manuscript, the authorised first edition and modern critical editions. Formal and interpretive findings were checked against August Göllerich’s records of Liszt’s lessons, relevant correspondence and scholarship on the composer’s late piano music.

Scores, Manuscripts and Primary Sources

Franz Liszt — Autograph manuscript of Valse, 23 July 1881. Library of Congress, Music Division, Washington, ML96 L58 Case. The manuscript documents both the date and the substantial rewriting of the ending: an original 24-bar conclusion was cancelled and replaced by 50 new bars.

Franz Liszt — Valse oubliée, first edition. Berlin & Posen: Bote & Bock, 1881, plate 12599. Liszt himself used this authorised edition in his teaching.

Liszt, Franz Rudolf Jung, ed. — Franz Liszt in seinen Briefen. Berlin, 1987. Includes the letters to Hugo Bock of 9 August and 8 September 1881 documenting the title and preparation of the first edition.

August Göllerich — Franz Liszts Klavierunterricht von 1884–1886, dargestellt an den Tagebuchaufzeichnungen von August Göllerich. Ed. Wilhelm Jerger. Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag, 1975. The principal source for Liszt’s directions in the lessons of 10 July 1885 and 18 February 1886.

Critical Editions

Franz Liszt — Valses oubliées, HN 977. Ed. Peter Jost, preface by Mária Eckhardt. Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 2010. Compares the first edition with the autograph and other surviving sources, with a detailed critical commentary.

Franz Liszt — Valses oubliées, Neue Liszt-Ausgabe, Series I, Vol. 14. Ed. Imre Mező and Imre Sulyok. Budapest: Editio Musica Budapest, 1984.

Biographical and Musicological Studies

Walker, Alan. Franz Liszt: The Final Years, 1861–1886. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Arnold, Ben, ed. The Liszt Companion. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2002, especially the chapter on the piano music of 1861–1886.

Eckhardt, Mária. Preface to Franz Liszt: Valses oubliées, HN 977. Munich: G. Henle Verlag, 2010.

Hamburger, Klára. “On Liszt’s Last Piano Works”, booklet essay for The Twilight of Liszt. Budapest Music Center Records, BMCCD185, 2011.

Recordings and Performance Tradition

Historical and modern recordings by Simon Barere, Vladimir Horowitz, Arthur Rubinstein, Leslie Howard, Adrienne Krausz and Stephen Hough were compared, with particular attention to the opening staccato chords, the characterisation of the scherzando, the relationship between the elegiac theme and the dance pulse, the accelerating trills and the shaping of the unaccompanied coda.

Digital Resources

G. Henle Verlag — Valses oubliées, HN 977: Publication history, preface and critical commentary on the genesis, manuscript sources and first edition.

Library of Congress — Franz Liszt Music Manuscripts: Digitised autograph manuscript of the 1881 Valse.

IMSLP — Valses oubliées, S. 215: Digitised scores, publication data and catalogue information for the four works.

Budapest Music Center — The Twilight of Liszt: Klára Hamburger’s essay on the late piano works and the harmonic language of the first Valse oubliée.

Note on Editions

The analysis follows the authorised first edition of 1881 as checked and restored in modern critical editions. The autograph is used to understand Liszt’s creative process and revisions, but is not treated mechanically as the superior final source, since the composer himself used and taught from the printed edition.