Il grande seduttore trionfante, ossia Don Juan

Starting from imprecise references of a structurally disconnected genre, Liszt begins to elaborate in his Fantaisie on Don Giovanni the principles that will find their supreme formal expression in the Sonate in B minor (1853). The most evident difference of the Réminiscences de Don Juan (1841) with the conventional schematic aspects of the genre that exploded in Paris in the first decades of the nineteenth century can be precisely identified in bithematicism which allows to attribute to the first part the function of the exposition, and to the third part that of the recapitulation, very close, therefore, to the masterly conception of the illuministic sonata form.
By making substantial changes to the history of the world’s most famous libertine these Réminiscences becomes in all senses the emblem of the new Æsthetic of romantic symbolism.
The analysis carried out with Schenkerian matrix tools seeks to identify internal coherence by also investigating the cohesion of the parts constituted by motives of different origin. At the same time, the multiplicity of Lisztian intervention is also evidenced in the harmonic field which already offers the first signs of decomposition of the musical syntax. The relationship between micro- and macro-formal structures, in their conception of harmonic interrelations, exemplify the Riemannian approach, thus distancing themselves from the tradition of tonal music expressed in the Schenkerian axiom of Ursatz.
With Liszt the non-Western suggestions of the source begin to countersign the musical texture giving a significant imprint. The research shows that some parts of the Réminiscences de Don Juan are characterized by that alla turca flavour of the quoted material from Mozart’s masterpiece, emphasized, however, even more by interlacing with the Kalindra scale — Shad Araban according to the eastern modal system based on Maqam — all under the sway of the blazing virtuosity unleashed.

Key Words: Liszt, Don Juan, sonata-form, fantaisie, réminiscences, Kalindra scale, program music