Franz Liszt: Piano Music Vol. 1

Description

From Cradle to Grave
More than forty years lie between the Trois Apparitions (1834), which opened up a new expressive world for Liszt, and the Third Year of Années de pèlerinage (1877). And yet the same dream seems to run through them, from the free, unguarded ecstasy of the youthful music (Malédiction!) to the dark resignation of the late works, already leaning toward the world beyond. Forty years drawn taut like a bow between the birth of an art and the end of a world—a world that began with his love for Marie d’Agoult and closed with her death in 1876.
Published only in 1883, the year Wagner died and three years before Liszt’s own death, this third book of Années de pèlerinage plainly mourns the end of an era. An entire chapter is closing, and the pain of that turning is heard in the darkest pieces of the set.
Liszt entered this “new world” at the end of 1832, when he met Marie—an encounter she herself describes in her Memoirs as “a strange apparition” rising before her eyes: “I say apparition, for want of another word to convey the extraordinary feeling first aroused in me by the most extraordinary person I had ever seen.” The feeling she evokes here, and which would continue to resonate in their letters at the beginning of their relationship in 1833, seems to echo through the almost supernatural atmosphere of these three Apparitions, as though touched by the aura of that exceptional love.
At twenty-three, Liszt already speaks in a wholly personal poetic voice, beholden to no model. The first of these Apparitions—really closer to an improvisation—seems to rise out of a dream, gradually taking shape as it unfolds while never leaving its quasi-impressionistic haze. A noble, Italianate melody in barcarolle rhythm emerges, more embodied and sensuous, only to be swept away, before the piece returns to its original drifting. The second, utterly unclassifiable, is a brief rhythmic caprice in which the outline of an Italian melody once again passes by in fleeting form, while the final Fantaisie sur une valse de Schubert preserves the whimsical, wayward, impromptu spirit that runs through the whole set, right up to its virtuosic yet elusive close.
Forty years later, the mark of religion—shared with his companion Carolyne de Sayn-Wittgenstein—pervades Liszt’s life and work alike, carrying both toward renunciation. That renunciation finds expression not only in his many choral works, but also in the piano pieces: the instrument remained his closest confidant, and the witness to his solitude, to the very end. The sensuality so present in the second book of Années is now transfigured by faith, which sustains almost the whole of the third, save for the very dark Sunt lacrymae rerum (“There are tears at the heart of things,” Virgil) and the Marche funèbre. These are two meditations on death: the former, written in 1872, in memory of the Hungarian patriots who fell in 1848–49; the latter, composed in 1867, in memory of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico, killed in that same year.
L’Angelus and Sursum Corda, which frame the collection, bear witness to this new period of asceticism and stripping away, revealing a noble, inward lyricism—almost clarion-like in Sursum Corda. Both are hymns, grave and noble at once. L’Angelus, recalling the ingenuous tone of certain pieces from Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, opens and closes with a light peal of bells drifting faintly through the evening air, while Sursum Corda powerfully proclaims the vibrant triumph of heaven and of faith.
The two Cyprès pieces and Jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este preserve what remains of the more sensuous side of the inspiration behind these books—books once devoted to art and nature, and to their extreme poetic transfiguration, but now turned inward and toward what lies beyond the visible world. Liszt wrote to Carolyne in September 1877:

“I spent those three days entirely beneath the cypresses! It was an obsession (…) those old trunks haunted me, and I could hear their branches singing, laden with their unchanging foliage!”

These striking pieces, in which death and love merge into a kind of timeless nostalgia, embody a contemplative state rooted in memories of the Roman Campagna through which Liszt traveled with Marie d’Agoult between 1837 and 1839. The delights of earthly love are joined there to those of divine love. The music is desolate and funereal, its opening already recalling the riven chords of Tristan; it moves from despair to the rawest pain in a kind of mobile stasis characteristic of late Liszt—the traveler marking time in death’s shadow…
Placed at the center of the book, the miraculous Jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este is Liszt’s last great piano work. In its radiant upsurge, it answers the Légende de saint François d’Assise and its mysticism, at once natural and supernatural. Songs of water and birdsong are akin when the aim is to praise Creation. Amid all the score’s “aquatic” effects, Liszt places as an epigraph the words of St John: “He who drinks this water shall never thirst again, for the water I give him will become within him an eternal spring,” thereby consecrating, in a single baptismal gesture, both the beauties of heaven and the world here below.

Liszt’s all-encompassing piano art is, like that lustral water, rebirth and salvation, fulfillment and sublimation, tone-painting and absolute transcendence—from youth to the grave.
Jean-Yves Clément
Writer and Festival Organizer