Nuages gris

Nuages gris (pronounced: [nɥaːʒ ɡʁi]; French, lit. Grey Clouds), S.199 or Trübe Wolken, is a work for piano solo composed by Franz Liszt on August 24, 1881. It is one of Liszt's most haunting and at the same time one of his most experimental works, representing, according to Allen Forte, "a high point in the experimental idiom with respect to expressive compositional procedure."' If we must look for biographical parallels with the music, perhaps the bleakness of mood is connected with difficulties faced by Liszt at the time of composition, when he was suffering from dropsy, failing eyesight, and severe injuries sustained in a fall down the stairs of the Hofgärtnerei seven weeks earlier.

Departing from his earlier virtuoso style, Liszt in his later years made several radical, compositional experiments, including Nuages gris, Unstern S.208 and Bagatelle sans tonalité S.216. Yet it was only in the second half of the twentieth century that the significance of Liszt's late experimental works began to be appreciated. R. Larry Todd, for example, has noted that "Arguably, Liszt was the first composer to establish the augmented triad as a truly independent sonority, to consider its implications for modem dissonance treatment, and to ponder its meaning for the future course of tonality. Liszt's accomplishments in these areas were considerable and support in no small way his position, in Busoni's phrase, as the 'master of freedom.' Scholars such as Humphrey Searle, Zoltán Harsányi, Bence Szabolcsi, Lajos Bárdos, and István Szelényi have contributed much to placing these works in the repertoire of today's pianists.