ABSTRACT
I only beg for permission to be allowed to decide upon the forms by the contents. . . . In the end it comes principally to this-what the ideas are, and how they are carried out and worked up-and that leads us always back to the feeling and in-- vention, if we would not scramble and struggle in the rut of a mere trade. (Letter to Louis Köhler, 9 July 1856, La Mara [trans. Bache], 1: 273-74)
lée d'Obermann from the late 1830s. In the case of Vallée, Liszt engaged sonata-form principles in his creative struggle, as he would in much of his later piano music, well into the 1870s. But in all three works, he explored to some degree the principle of thematic change, more commonly known as thematic transformation. Generally employed as a unification device (and as an alternative to traditional techniques of thematic development), thematic transformation was exploited by Liszt as a form-defining agent: in Liszt's music, the transformed theme often assumes a structural impor-- tance as great as that traditionally given only to the opening material. The result is a fundamentally different kind of approach to form, character-- ized by a process of organic growth.
