A very (for the most part) dark, often highly chromatic improvisation. Unlike most of the improvisations I've posted here of late, this one is totally free and there have been no conscious nods to considerations of musical architecture.
It inhabits the same territory, perhaps, as Liszt's Harmonies poetiques et religieuses and sometimes later Liszt. A hesitant, questioning opening leads into a dolorous, quasi-operatic section, growing ever more impassioned with intensely chromatic harmonies. A passing torpor gives way into a brief storm which slowly resolves into an almost ecstatic middle section (I find this part reminiscent of Liszt's Cantique d'amour, which used to be in my repertoire). The major key section ends with the dominant Bb being repeated until it falls a semitone to the median of the new key as the music returns to a sense of deep despondency. A funeral march follows, before the piece ends with an ethereal passage in the treble leading to a Bb major resolution (not sure, but I might have been subconsciously a bit influenced here by the end of the Liszt Sonata).
Topic: Elegie melancolique