Wandering Through Tonal Space: Hexatonic Harmony, Thematic Syntax, and Parageneric Functions

The revived effort towards a nineteenth-century ‘Romantic’ Formenlehre—reliant predominantly on the efforts of William Caplin’s theory of formal functions (1998), and of James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy’s Elements of Sonata Theory (2006)—tends to focus its attention on the works of conservative composers, enforcing the view that large-scale form post-Beethoven remains fundamentally teleological. The realisation of that telos is predicated on the practices of the Viennese classical in a variety of guises and is governed by what Sonata Theory has termed “the essential generic markers” of tonality, thematic syntax, and ultimately, cadential closure.
Permeation of hexatonic harmony into a restrained tonal architecture can problematize the ‘normative’ proceedings of the Formenlehre model, thereby challenging the concept of normativity altogether as a product of empirical exclusivity. This paper examines three extracts from Liszt’s Weimar output to contextualise these harmonic strategies within various formal roles, including introductory material, secondary theme groups, and structural borders—thereby parsing their function as tools of a hermeneutically charged expressive system. For Liszt, the unification of diatonic schemata alongside harmony that is chromatically altered, but not pitch-centric, may provide a richer palette by which listeners experience an accompanying emotional narrative. The paper thus concludes by suggesting that the Weimar period served as the contextual seed for Liszt’s later harmonic practice, interpolating hexatonic spaces as divergent parts of a paratactic system that looks towards a triadic post-tonality.