Explain in your own words how composers Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner were able to transform and deliberately alter the main characteristics of...

It could
easily be argued that Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner were the end point of the transformations
that took place in nineteenth-century European music. Liszt and Wagner dispensed with the
well-codified forms of the nineteenth-century and instead began to experiment with fantasy
through-composed compositions as well as tone poems. As they moved away from strict forms, their
music began to wander through chromaticism instead of existing within key structures.

Another of their innovations was the technique of using leitmotifs to aurally depict
specific characters within their compositions. While Liszt did use the leitmotif to a great
extent, especially in his symphonic poem Les Preludes, it was Wagner who
took the technique of the leitmotif to its logical conclusion in his operas. Wagner used the
leitmotif to musically depict the characters of his operas to both foreshadow them in the story
and accompany them while on stage.

At the end of the nineteenth century, many
European composers felt that the techniques of Romanticism had run their course. The heightened
dramatic techniques of Liszt, Wagner, and (later) Mahler were the catalyst that sent music in a
new direction. Composers such as Debussy, Ravel, and Satie turned to Asian and folk music for
new ideas and new directions. Their move away from the binary major/minor system of tonality
ultimately led to the Abstract Expressionism of Arnold Sch¶nberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, and
Igor Stravinsky.