La lugubre gondola is one of Franz Liszt's most important late works.
Its genesis is well documented in letters from which we know that Liszt was Richard Wagner's guest in the Palazzo Vendramin on the Grand Canal in Venice in late 1882. Liszt may have had a premonition there of Wagner's death which inspired the first version of the work: a piano piece in 4/4, written in December 1882 (which remained unpublished until the Rugginenti edition of 2002). This piece was recomposed very shortly afterwards in January 1883 (but was not published until 1885, and then with minor changes - this version is today usually called La lugubre gondola II), and shortly thereafter arranged for violin or cello and piano (the string version does not contain the alterations in the version published in 1885).
Wagner died in Venice on February 13, 1883, and the long funeral procession to Bayreuth began with the funeral gondola to Venice's Santa Lucia railway station. Now Liszt was almost certainly considering the piece to be a Wagner memorial, and in 1885 he returned to the string version and replaced the last three bars with a twenty-bar coda. According to Liszt's correspondence with Lina Ramann, this piece was originally to have been entitled Troisième élégie and dedicated to her.
There is an undated manuscript, clearly from the end of Liszt's life, of a starker version of the piece in 6/8 for piano solo – virtually a new composition, usually called La lugubre gondola I. It remained unpublished until 1927.