Liszt and Wagner were born just two years apart, traveled in the same musical circles, and became good friends—each admiring and promoting the other’s music. But in a tangled scandal that the principals strove to keep from the press, Liszt’s daughter Cosima began an affair with Wagner in 1863 though she was married to conductor and pianist Hans von Bülow. Not only was Bülow a piano student of Liszt (he premiered Liszt’s B minor Sonata and Totentanz, among other great works, such as Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto), but he also became friendly with Wagner and premiered two of his great operas, Tristan und Isolde in 1865 and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in 1868.

It was in April 1865 that Cosima gave birth to the first of three children by Wagner—they named her Isolde, and Bülow, humiliated and hurt but hoping to avoid scandal, registered her as his daughter out of his devotion to Wagner. Against this, Bülow conducted the Tristan premiere exactly two months later, on June 10. Liszt, for his part, highly disapproved of his daughter’s relationship with Wagner, not only because of his loyalty to Bülow but because it involved Cosima’s rejection of Catholicism. Liszt made several attempts to convince Wagner to give up Cosima, the last by visiting him in 1867, but when that failed, he broke off relations with Wagner for five years.

And yet it was in 1867, at the height of the crisis, that Liszt composed his masterful paraphrase, Isolde’s Liebestod, from Tristan. Despite his personal trauma in regard to Wagner’s actions, Liszt was able—like Bülow, astoundingly—to separate the man’s personal shortcomings from his sublime music—something that has become a rather global phenomenon. Liszt had long made Wagner’s operatic works accessible through piano transcriptions, but this paraphrase represents something far more than a simple transcription—it is an ingenious reimagining of Wagner’s vision.

The third act finale, in which Tristan dies in Isolde’s arms and she then joins him in death, is now known as the Liebestod, though Wagner had originally called it “Verklärung” (Transfiguration). Conversely, Wagner used the label “Liebestod” for his concert performances of the equally famous Prelude, because it illustrates the Wagner/Schopenhauer philosophy linking love and death. It was Liszt and the present piano that led to “Liebestod” being universally employed for Wagner’s ecstatic finale.

Liszt faced a formidable task in converting Wagner’s rich orchestration and contrapuntal textures to the piano, especially the re-creation of some of the biggest climaxes known to music. Because of the piano’s natural decay of sound, Liszt accomplishes this by means of arpeggios, tremolos, and repeated chords. He also highlights Wagner’s advanced harmonies—akin to his own—faithfully adapting Wagner’s yearning for the home key and Isolde’s final attainment of ethereal peace.

—©Jane Vial Jaffe