ABSTRACT
In a groundbreaking article on Liszt's "experimental idiom" published in 1987, Allen Forte distinguishes between two general types of Lisztian music: the traditional music of triadic tonality and the experimental music, which represents innovational departures from the norms of tonal syntax. Avoiding issues of influence, Forte makes no claim for a direct line connecting Liszt's experimental music to these later figures; indeed, he does not even suggest that "this emergent phase" of twentieth-century musical development gave rise to "any kind of orderly evolutionary progression". Among the earlier works Forte considers is the song Blume und Duft, one of Liszt's most beautiful and elusive creations, composed in 1860. Forte modestly characterizes his analytical remarks on individual pieces as no more than a "brief description of some of the general surface characteristics of the experimental idiom intended only as the most casual kind of introduction to this extraordinary music".
