It’s hardly original to observe that Liszt’s late compositions are enigmatic, anticipating the future course of music. Yet it is useful to be reminded of these products of his final years, given the entrenched clichés of Liszt as a notorious womanizer, a hyper-virtuoso, and—above all—a showman whose compositions aim only for effect. After all, such clichés tend to be reinforced by the enduring popularity of certain works that helped establish this one-sided view of Liszt: the fiendishly difficult “Hungarian Rhapsodies,” the rapturous “Liebesträume,” the dazzling pair of piano concertos. But what are we to make of the cryptic piano pieces that Liszt created in the last years of his life, outside the public spotlight—some of which didn’t become known until the 20th century, long after his death?

Memory and melancholy, even a sense of resignation, characterize Liszt’s late-period piano compositions. “Pieces fit for the asylum or even the death chamber,” is how the composer once described them. “As you know,” he explained to Lina Ramann, his biographer, “I carry a burden of deep sorrow in my heart; now and then it must erupt in sound.” Indeed, every bar of this music seems to express Liszt’s personal disappointments, whether over the deaths of two of his children, the Church’s refusal to grant permission for his marriage to Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, or the lack of recognition he received as a composer. The pieces that Liszt wrote in his old age lament and commemorate the past. An example can be heard in the two versions of “La lugubre gondola” that Maurizio Pollini and Khatia Buniatishvili will perform. This gloomy tone painting was inspired by the black funeral gondolas Liszt watched gliding silently by when he visited Richard Wagner, his difficult son-in-law, in Venice in 1882; he composed it “as a premonition six weeks before Wagner’s death.”

But it was precisely this melancholic attitude, along with the non-public character of his last works, that led Liszt to an extraordinarily modern artistic radicalism. For example, with its tonally ambiguous writing and meandering chord progressions, “Nuages gris,” which both Lise de la Salle and Maurizio Pollini will perform, might be considered the first “atonal” piano composition—while at the same time evoking the title’s image of “grey clouds” drifting hazily across the sky. Taut, thematically untethered, harmonically daring, indeed visionary: it is through their modernity that Liszt’s late meditations achieve a tremendous power of suggestion. And with their almost hypnotic attraction, they can be just as gripping for audiences as the virtuoso concert works from Liszt’s middle years. You can experience this in the programs Maurizio Pollini and Lise de la Salle have designed: Each pianist will pair this unique late-period work with such Lisztian masterpieces as the great B minor Sonata, the “Dante” Sonata, and the opulent Ballade in B minor.