makayla

At the end of his life, Liszt was still composing and bringing his style toward music that was more concentrated and austere. The bravado is gone. Instead there are several reflections on death. More than his own death, it seems that Liszt prophesied the death of tonality itself where there is no relief from harmonic stability; free chromaticism held together as diminished chords without a resolution and built on small motives. 'Grey Clouds' is as dreary as the name suggests and is put together with minimalistic ideas and based on the Hungarian "gypsy" scale. The main theme is of six notes in two groups of three; a fourth and a tritone, then a g minor chord. The same melody is repeated over a trembling Bb (the third of g minor). The tremolo growl shifts a semitone down and back again, the minor third and its augmentation. Over it, an inverted eb minor triad, which descends chromatically over each repetition of the tremolo ostinato. It 'resolves' with the tritone again in the bass. Even though g minor was hinted at, this section ends ambiguously. We then get a slight variation of the theme at the bottom register of the keyboard that feels like a droning echo of bells. The main theme comes back as the accompaniment to a simple 'counter subject'. That leads to another chromatic crawl, going upwards this time, while the tremolo bass is turned into an accompaniment combining the Bb - A shift with the 'ambiguous' chords moving downward, broken up into a swaying rhythm. Bass repeats, the chords move down, while the octaves move up. Instead of a clear resolution, we end with more ambiguity. The slowness, softness, and 'dissonance' of the piece are evocative of the grey clouds that pass over every autumn, another reminder of death and decay, as the passionate harmonies of the 19th century also 'decay' into more free chromaticism and the eventual 'liberation' of pitches.