Liszt’s most consummate work for piano – a unique study in thematic transformation, an essay of complex structural organization, of wondrous tonal insights and enigmatic harmonic manifestations, of molten no less than fragile keyboard layout – the Piano Sonata in B minor (1851–1853) was first performed in public in Berlin by Hans von Bülow (Liszt’s pupil and son-in-law) at a concert given on 22 January 1857 to inaugurate the first grand piano to be made by Carl Bechstein. ‘An unexpected, almost unanimous success … completely [dumbfounding] the cretinous scoundrels’, was Bülow’s verdict to the composer. Liszt dedicated it to Schumann.