Many have written and said that Franz Liszt was a progressive personality and what is more, a phenomenon whose music, piano playing, musical thinking and compositional techniques far surpassed the standards of his era. I will not give you musical examples in this chapter as many experts have done it before. For those who want to have a clearer picture of the subject it is highly suggested to obtain the book of Lajos Bárdos, Liszt Ferenc, a jövő zenésze(93) where everything of importance can be found together with numerous musical examples in logical order and clearly explained. There are a few other works dealing with this subject. These are included in the bibliography at the end of the study. I will only briefly refer to a small number of facts and phenomena that have greater importance in regard to the present study. From the previous chapters it is clear that the earlier period of Liszt (when he was active as a pianist and virtuoso composer) had more influence on the ragtime and early jazz era, while swing, and especially modern jazz, were influenced by his later period. Of course, Liszt influenced jazz indirectly, through the classical music of the 20th century rather than directly. In any case, we have to find the progressive elements of his art by analysing his later works. Besides the mixtures (which can also be found among the examples of Chapter VIII), the altered (or rather transformed, almost mistuned) and ninth, eleventh and thirteenth chords, a great number of features can be found in Liszt’s works which became accepted in music only twenty, thirty, sometimes forty years later. The late art of Liszt is pure, he uses fewer tones, slower tempos, and his works have a philosophical quality. This is the result partly of his growing religiousness and partly of his compositional development throughout his long creative period. He had exact ideas about the music of the future towards the end of his life. It would simplify the task of every musicologist if his Sketches for a Harmony of the Future had not been lost. He must have written about ideas in this, perhaps unfinished, study which now we can only guess by analysing his works. In his crystallized art, Liszt goes back to earlier ages and simpler tonal systems used in the folk music of various peoples, too. Pentatony, which is the base of most folk music thus of blues scales(94) as well, becomes primarily important and he prefers using Gregorian melodies and Renaissance harmonization. Liszt’s later works cannot really be analysed functionally according to classical harmonies but modal thinking is necessary. Of course, those old harmonies are used in a much more difficult and complex musical texture. Liszt was a genius in using old things in a revolutionary new way. He used modal scales and triads not according to the old rules but in a ‘post-romantic logic’. He used them not only in progression but put them on top of each other. Thus his strange chords are not the results of the romantic mistuning of certain functional chords or endless continuation of tertial harmonies. Liszt simply used plain triads which, according to his new but reasonable logic, have the same or similar function, and are sounded simultaneously. When there is function at all, since function as a phenomenon has a new meaning and the situation is much more complex than in classical music or with other romantic composers. Excellent examples of this are the Fourth Mephisto Waltz, the Bagatelle without Tonality (both from 1885) or another piano piece, Nuages gris from 1881. Even though modal thinking is present in the works of other late romantic composers (Wagner, Richard Strauss and others), it became accepted and commonly used in French impressionism. Liszt was about twenty-five, thirty years ahead of Schoenberg in atonal thinking (even a basic twelve-tone method can be traced in Liszt’s works) and the variety of model scales used by Liszt are main characteristics of Bartók’s music. I am not mentioning other phenomena in Liszt’s music introduced and analysed by Lajos Bárdos (polar relations, alternating distance scales - i.e. model scales -, ultra third-relation) and am not dealing with harmonic groups with different special names (overtone, alpha, beta and gamma harmonies). The previously mentioned examples, I believe, are convincing enough in regard to understanding their possible influence on jazz.