[3][4] At this point in his life, Liszt's career as a traveling virtuoso had almost entirely subsided, as Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein had influenced him to concentrate on composing rather than performing.

[5] Liszt settled in Weimar in 1848 where he devoted to composition,[6] and live a comfortable lifestyle, composing, and occasionally performing, entirely by choice rather than necessity.

Superimposed upon the four movements is a large sonata form structure,[19] although the precise beginnings and endings of the traditional development and recapitulation sections have long been a topic of debate.

[1] While its distinct movements: allegro, adagio, scherzo and finale are combined into one, the entire work is encompassed within an overarching sonata form — exposition, development, and recapitulation.

This fully-fledged movement, in compound ternary form, features, in quick succession, a number of themes heard earlier in the Sonata in a tour de force of thematic economy.

This piece, which in 1865 was published as a two-piano version under the title Concerto pathétique, shows a thematic relationship to both the Sonata and the later Faust Symphony.

[36] It took a long time for the Sonata to become commonplace in concert repertoire because of its technical difficulty and negative initial reception due to its status as "new" music.

[37] Camille Saint-Saëns, a close friend of Liszt, made a two-piano arrangement of the Sonata in 1914, but it was never published in his lifetime because of rights issues.

Heinz Roemheld orchestrated the Sonata which is heard on some 1930s movies, including The Black Cat (1934), starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi, The Raven (1935), as well as the Flash Gordon serials (1936) (Chapters 6–13), Werewolf of London (1936), and Mars Attacks the World (1938).

Frederick Ashton used the Sonata for his 1963 ballet Marguerite and Armand, created for Margot Fonteyn and Rudolf Nureyev, based on "The Lady of the Camellias" by Alexandre Dumas, fils.

[45] Recordings include performances by Nicholas Angelich, Idil Biret, Martha Argerich, Claudio Arrau, Emanuel Ax, Jorge Bolet, Khatia Buniatishvili, Leon Fleisher, Emil Gilels, Hélène Grimaud, Vladimir Horowitz, Paul Lewis, Maurizio Pollini, Sviatoslav Richter, Arthur Rubinstein, Van Cliburn, Yundi Li, Daniil Trifonov, Tamás Vásáry, Yuja Wang, André Watts, Krystian Zimerman, Benjamin Grosvenor, Kenneth Hamilton, Sophia Agranovich, Seong-Jin Cho and Igor Levit.