This unusual and enthralling piece is one of four forgotten waltzes composed between 1881 and ca. 1885. The fourth was discovered and published in the United States in 1954.

The Johann Strauss-like introduction is an unusual harmonic series of staccato chords (minor sevenths moving into diminished sevenths) and establishes a mood of modernity, sophistication, and of the fantastique. The melody, built around arpeggiated ninth chords in F sharp major, swoops upward and dips downward in ever increasing arcs. The left hand harmonies are based on the upper partials of the chords (like the twentieth century practice of many jazz pianists).

A second motif marked scherzando (jokingly) follows with laughing grace notes and octave skips. The underlying harmonies still reflect the interplay of different kinds of seventh chords that characterized the introduction.

The third section suddenly bursts forth with a fortissimo appassionato theme. Built on a common waltz syncopated rhythm (almost like the accented skips of a Ländler), the chromatic melody and rolling harmony are nevertheless quite different.

The introduction is repeated verbatim as an interlude. The main theme is recapitulated in the new key of G minor. As in Renaissance practice, the form of the melody is kept but the mode is switched, so that, in this case, for example, the major ninth of the original melody becomes a minor ninth.

A series of rotating seconds turns into a trill that introduces the most remarkable section of this piece. The previous appassionato theme is recalled but their previous underlying harmonies are shifted and a low F sharp pedal tone is added. The result is striking, phantasmagoric amoroso music that arises from deep in the subconscious. One can really appreciate the remarkable change in Liszt's aesthetics and "ear" during his later period upon hearing passages like this one.

This full-bodied, resonant conclusion slowly diminishes into dolce (sweet) reflections from the theme in the form of slow melodic fragments played in unaccompanied unison lines. The composition ends with the unresolved dominant step tone hanging in the air.

© All Music Guide

No.2

As in the initial gestures of the First Valse oubliée—hands straying across the keyboard as if looking for something before opening the flood of memory—the Second pursues the same gambit a bit longer in flickerings, gossamer, and trills, reaching back over 40 years to the Grande Valse di Bravura of 1836. Beside the lamentations and religious preoccupation of Liszt's old age, both admirably represented in the Third Book of the Années de pèlerinage, and the spectral, haunted works—Nuages gris, for instance, the two Lugubre gondola pieces, or the Csárdás macabre, which seem to look, shuddering and fascinated, into "death's dream kingdom"—there are lighter, happier evocations, such as the dozen pieces of Weihnachtsbaum (the Christmas Tree Suite), the delicate nocturne En Rêve, or the nostalgia-rife Romance oubliée and the four Valses oubliées recalling youthful giddiness and swagger with the airiest, most mercurial playfulness. The young Liszt, who might play Beethoven straight for an inner circle—including Berlioz, George Sand, the critic Legouvé, the once-popular novelist Eugène Sue—was a popular entertainer who wowed the public with his operatice paraphrases and transcriptions (some, like those on Donizetti's Lucrezia Borgia, so overloaded that only Liszt could play them) or with his own phenomenally successful Grand galop chromatique. Pianist and conductor Charles Hallé, who heard Liszt in Paris during his glory years, recalled a concert at the Conservatoire in which Liszt and violinist Massart were to play Beethoven's "Kreutzer" Sonata. "Massart was just commencing the first bar of the introduction when a voice from the audience called out 'Robert le Diable!' At that time Liszt had composed a very brilliant fantasia on themes from that opera and played it always with immense success. The call was taken up by other voices, and in a moment the cries 'Robert le Diable! Robert le Diable' drowned the tones of the violin. Liszt rose, bowed, and said; 'Je suis toujours l'humble serviteur du public...'...Liszt turned half around to poor Massart and dismissed him with a wave of the hand, without a syllable of excuse or regret. He did play the fantasia magnificently, rousing the public to a frenzy of enthusiasm; then called Massart out of his retreat and we had the 'Kreutzer,' which somehow no longer seemed in its right place." Composed in 1883, the Second Valse oubliée looks back with joy, elegance, and teasing fantasy—"without...excuse or regret"—to another fantastic showstopper that crossed the threshold to "Lisztomania."

© Adrian Corleonis, All Music Guide