(a) Harmony has been the main site of interest in the study of Liszt's late works for a good reason. Its quirkiness and seemingly proto-twentieth-century modernism continues to tickle the historical imagination and whet the analytical appetite. Music analysts and theorists have long tried to explain how Liszt's putative post-tonality works. Arguably this discourse already reached its apex with previous notable post-Schenkerian studies by American scholars (Morgan, 1976; Forte, 1987; Baker, 1990; Dickinson, 2002), although a trickle of studies on the same theme continues. Despite considerable technical improvements on analytically less developed postwar surveys of harmony in Liszt's late style, the narrow pursuit of the question of post-tonality resulted in a more limited understanding of harmonic lateness and the multiplicity of Liszt's late harmonic styles. The excitement about the prophetic qualities of the music (much of it based on recycled myth and modernist ideology) has also obscured any sense of this harmony's relation to its own historical time.

Two works composed in 1872 serve as useful case studies to illustrate the historical context we have been missing in analysis. By way of introduction, we begin with the loaded concept of ‘lateness' and how harmony in the Lied J'ai perdu ma force et ma vie may be considered ‘late'. The main part of the paper explores a strange, marked moment in Liszt's Impromptu. A quick examination of opening statements from earlier impromptus and nocturnes by Schubert, Chopin and a much younger Liszt shows how harmonic conventions associated with lyrical openings in (by now) classic genres are being ‘remembered' in the 1872 Impromptu. Next, the paper demonstrates how and why the marked moment from the beginning can sound simultaneously strange and familiar: strange due to its distortion of convention, and strangely familiar due to the less obvious way it relates to classical schemata. Finally, the way a delicate balance between rupture and coherence continues in other structural moments in the work leads to some tentative conclusions about analysing and conceptualising late harmony from a generic perspective. The current paper is an abridged extract from ‘Harmony in a Generic Perspective', the fifth chapter in my forthcoming book Liszt's Late Style(s).