Liszt was two years older than Verdi and their careers follow a similar trajectory—early struggles to master their respective métiers, marked by glorious excess and virtuosity, followed by abundant years of surefire mastery, giving way with age to a darker, deeper expressiveness. For Verdi, this meant leaving behind the too-pat reversals of Scribe and Victor Hugo's dramaturgy (e.g., Un ballo in maschera adapted from Scribe's libretto for Auber's Gustave III, or Rigoletto, based on Hugo's Le roi s'amuse) to explore character. Simon Boccanegra was a transitional work through which Verdi found his way to the masterpieces of the 1860s: La forza del destino and Don Carlos. After its initial airing—it was premiered at Venice's La Fenice on March 12, 1857, and heard as far away as Lisbon, Malta, and Buenos Aires—audiences found its plot complications too involved and abandoned it, despite containing music anticipating Don Carlos and Otello. An inveterate reviser, Verdi felt he had put some of the best of himself into the opera and, in "retirement" after Aïda (while secretly composing Otello), had Otello's librettist Arrigo Boïto remodel Boccanegra's libretto, to which he adapted the original score and composed new music. The revised Simon Boccanegra triumphed at Milan's La Scala on March 24, 1881, and was soon enthusiastically received in Vienna, Paris, and Buenos Aires. The following year Liszt composed his Réminiscences de Boccanegra, the last of his operatic fantasies. The two composers seem never to have met, which is just as well as Verdi, ignoring or ignorant of the great art Liszt lavished on his transcriptions and fantasies, dismissed Liszt in the same breath with that legion of other spinners of popular piano potpourris of tunes drawn from his operas as "plagiarists." Liszt, on the other hand, had closely watched Verdi's growth and responded to it avidly. It is telling that the best of his Verdi adaptations seize on one salient moment—the quartet in Rigoletto, the tower scene in Il Trovatore—to render it almost literally, albeit with brilliantly inventive pianistic equivalents for Verdi's often crude effects. Réminiscences de Boccanegra fastens on three moments—the glowingly evocative orchestral introduction, the call to arms of the Act II finale, and Boccanegra's death scene, rounded with a brief coda of Liszt's devising returning us to the introduction. The spare writing and the harmonic asperity fathered on Verdi's Italianate warmth single this out as powerfully etched rather than opulently illuminated in the manner of Liszt's other fantasies.

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