Program notes by Eric Bromberger

ANNÉES DE PÈLERINAGE
(YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE)

Three contemporary descriptions of Franz Liszt:

an excessively tall and thin figure, a pale face with sea-green eyes which shone with rapid flashes like waves in flames . . . an indecisive walk in which he seemed to glide rather than set foot on the ground, a distracted and unquiet appearance like that of a ghost about to return to darkness.

His mouth turns up at the corners, which gives him a most crafty and Mephistophelean expression when he smiles, and his whole appearance and manner have a sort of Jesuitical elegance and ease . . . He is all spirit, but half the time at least, a mocking spirit . . . He is rather tall and narrow . . . and he made me think of an old-time magician more than anything, and I felt that with a touch of his wand he could transform us all.

I saw Liszt’s countenance assume that agony of expression, mingled in the paintings of Our Saviour by some of the early masters; his hands rushed over the keys, the floor on which I sat shook like a wire, and the whole audience was wrapped in sound, when the hand and frame of the artist gave way. He fainted in the arms of the friend who was turning pages for him, and we bore him out in a fit of hysterics. The effect of this scene was really dreadful. The whole room sat breathless with fear, till Hiller came forward and announced that Liszt was already restored to consciousness and was comparatively well again. As I handed Madame de Circourt to her carriage, we both trembled like poplar leaves, and I tremble scarcely less as I write this.

Over the span of what promises to be an extraordinary afternoon and evening, pianist Louis Lortieoffers those attending this concert a virtually unique musical experience: a complete performance of all three books of Franz Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”). This monumental work occupied Liszt across almost his entire creative career: he sketched the earliest of these pieces when he was in his twenties and completed the last when he was 66. The twenty-three pieces that make up Années de pèlerinage span a total of nearly three hours (there will be a break for dinner between Book II and Book III), and this music shows us many facets of Liszt’s complex personality.It will show us the virtuoso pianist, of course, but we will also see Liszt the traveler, alert to place and to physical impressions. This music will let us hear Liszt the lyricist (some of Liszt’s loveliest music is in the Années de pèlerinage), but we will also be aware of Liszt the visionary, a composer who heard entirely new sounds and created a daring new harmonic language. We will sense Liszt the reader, alert to the literature of his day, and Liszt the political activist, keenly tuned to the events and forces around him. And we will recognize that the composer of this music was Abbé Liszt, who in his later years took minor religious orders in Rome and who always found in his own faith one of the strongest well-springs of his own creativity. In a very real sense, the three books of Années de pèlerinage offer a musical autobiography of Liszt. He sketched the music of the first book when he was still a very young man, the second book comes from the years of his maturity and greatest fame, and the last book represents some of his final musical thoughts, as he looked back across his life and into the future.

The “pilgrimage” of the title was Liszt’s own–this music records his travels, both physical and spiritual, through Europe, through art, and through time. But the audience at this concert will become voyagers of their own–they will accompany Liszt on this journey, experiencing his world through his eyes and ears, and in the process they will take on some of that creator’s own temperament, one that combined a fiery spirit with the most sensitive understanding. It will be monumental journey for all who venture out to accompany Liszt on it.

Première Année: Suisse, S.160
Franz LISZT
Born October 22, 1811, Raiding
Died July 31, 1886, Bayreuth

In 1835, the young Franz Liszt and his mistress Marie d’Agoult took up residence in Geneva, where their first daughter was born that December. Marie d’Agoult (1805-1876) was an impressive figure in her own right. Trapped in an arranged marriage and the mother of two small children, she abandoned her family to become Liszt’s lover. The two lived together at a time when that was considered scandalous; they had three children together, and one of these, Cosima, would later become the wife of Richard Wagner. After she and Liszt split up in 1844, Marie d’Agoult became a historian, political observer, and writer–her history of the revolutions of 1848 remains a respected work even today.

Liszt had toured throughout Europe, but he loved staying in Switzerland, and over the next four years he composed a collection of piano pieces inspired by Swiss scenes and published these in 1842 under the title Album d’un voyageur. He was only in his twenties when he wrote these pieces, and as the years went by he felt the need to revise these youthful efforts. He came back to them when he was in his early forties and living in Weimar, revised the set, and published them in 1855 under the title Années de pèlerinage (Suisse): “Years of Pilgrimage: Switzerland.”

The nine pieces of the Swiss collection stretch out to nearly fifty minutes, and they encompass a wide range of expression, from gentle pastoral impressions through thunderous mountain storms, from solemn and heroic music to the playful. The nine pieces do not need extended comment and should be enjoyed as the evocative scene-painting that Liszt intended.

Some brief notes: Chapelle de Guillaume Tell is an act of homage to Switzerland’s national hero, here set in ternary form, with solemn outer sections surrounding a more animated center section.

Several of the pieces are examples of “water music”: Au lac du Wallenstadt and Au bord d’une source are full of the rippling, sparkling evocation of water that would–two generations later–so influence Debussy and Ravel. Lake Wallenstadt is a massive lake set high in a mountain valley in Switzerland. Of Au lac du Wallenstadt Marie d’Agoult later wrote: “the shores of the lake of Wallenstadt kept us for a long time. Franz wrote there for me a melancholy harmony, imitative of the sigh of the waves and cadence of oars, which I have never been able to hear without weepint.” In Liszt’s published version of Au bord d’une source, the piece is prefaced by a quotation from Schiller: “In murmuring coolness the play of young Nature begins.”

Other pieces picture scenes from the high meadows of Switzerland: Pastorale, with its cascading thirds and rocking rhythms, and Eglogue, based on shepherd songs. Orageis a depiction of a storm in the mountains (that title means simply “storm”); Liszt marks the main section Presto furioso, and pounding octaves evoke the fury of the storm. Le mal du pays is an evocation of homesickness. Two of the pieces appear to have been especially close to Liszt’s heart. Vallée d’Obermann was inspired by a scene from Etienne Senancour’s novel Obermann (1804), in which a wild young hero wanders restlessly through the forests of Switzerland. This is the longest of the nine pieces, and Liszt sets for himself the difficult task of picturing the hero going through a transcendental experience. The conception seems almost orchestral, and in fact Liszt instructs the pianist at points to play quasi cello and quasi oboe; beginning quietly on the falling phrases that run throughout, this piece rises to an ecstatic climax.

Liszt described Les cloches de Genève as a nocturne that incorporates the sound of the churchbells of Geneva. After some of the furious episodes that have preceded it, this brings the set to a quiet close in the calm night of Geneva. Two generations later, a young French composer named Maurice Ravel wrote a similar description of the sound of church bells in a deep valley, La vallée des cloches, and published it as the last movement of his Miroirs.

Deuxième Année: Italie, S.161

Liszt and Marie d’Agoult made an extended visit to Italy in 1838-39. While in Italy, Liszt began to sketch a second collection of piano pieces in the manner of the Album d’un voyageur. But where that collection, which eventually became the first book of Années de pèlerinage, was devoted to physical locations in Switzerland, now Liszt changed his focus: the seven pieces of Italie were inspired by varied works of Italian art.

The first three pieces depict quite different works. The gently lyric Sposalizio was inspired by Raphael’s painting “The Betrothal of the Virgin Mary,” on display in the Brera Museum in Milan. This music seems to capture some of the rich reds, blues, and browns of that painting.

The dark Il Penseroso was written in response to Michelangelo’s imposing statue of Giuliano de’ Medici in the Medici Chapel in Florence. In the score, Liszt prefaced this piece, which has been described as “brooding melancholy,” with a quotation from Michelangelo: “I am thankful to sleep, and more thankful to be made of stone. So long as injustice and shame remain on earth, I count it a blessing not to see or feel; so do not wake me–speak softly!”

The Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa is Liszt’s lively setting of a song attributed to that artist. Rosa (1615-1673) was both poet and painter. He spent his career in northern Italy, where he executed a series of intense canvases that have seemed to many to look forward to romanticism.

While in Italy, Liszt and Marie d’Agoult read through the sonnets of Petrarch together, and Liszt was so struck by these poems that the following year he wrote three songs that set Petrarch’s sonnets 104, 47, and 123. Liszt transcribed the three songs as piano pieces and revised them for inclusion in the second book of Années de pèlerinage. While the impulse behind these three pieces is lyric, Liszt turned the piano versions into virtuoso keyboard works.

Sonetto 47 opens with a brief but impetuous introduction before settling into the main melody of the song, which Liszt marks both con intimo sentimento and sempre dolce and which sings gracefully on syncopated rhythms.

By contrast, the famous Sonetto 104 opens powerfully (Agitato assai), as befits the troubled topic of this sonnet, but this abrupt beginning quickly gives way to the melody of the song, which is extended at length. The writing for piano is particularly impressive here, with difficult chordal passages, powerful writing in octaves, great cadenza-like flourishes, and chains of thirds.

The subject of Sonetto 123 is more peaceful, and Liszt marks this setting Lento placido and specifies that the performance should be dolcissimo and espressivo.

The final work of this set is a sort of companion-piece to the three Petrarch settings. Liszt borrowed the elaborate name Après une lecture du Dante from a poem by Victor Hugo and appended his own description fantasia quasi sonata; the work is sometimes known as the Dante Sonata. Written in 1839, the same year as the Petrarch settings, it was very difficult for Liszt: Marie d’Agoult wrote to a friend to say that its composition “was sending him to the very devil.” Certainly the topic gripped Liszt, for it here inspires some of his most vivid tone-painting.

The Dante Sonata opens with powerful descending octaves meant to depict the entry into hell and doubtless inspired by the line “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” Liszt underlines this association by having the octaves descend on the interval of a tritone. This unsettling interval (a diminished fifth) has been associated for centuries with the devil–its unresolved dissonance was referred to as the diabolus in musica, and its use was forbidden in some circles. Here that ominous sound makes an ideal accompaniment for the descent into hell, and soon we are plunged into the torment of the damned on music that Liszt marks lamentoso. Liszt biographer Alan Walker notes that one of Liszt’s students–on information provided by the composer–copied the following lines from The Inferno into his own score at this point:

Here sighs, with lamentations and loud moans,
Resounded through the air pierced by no star,
That e’en I wept at entering. Strange tongues,
Horrible cries, words of pain,
Tones of anger, voices deep and hoarse,
With hands together smote that swelled the sounds,
Made up a tumult, that for ever whirls
Round through that air with solid darkness stained,
Like to the sand that in the whirlwind flies.

Consolation comes with the serene second subject, perhaps a vision of heaven from out of the pit of hell. Liszt extends these ideas through a furious development–there are moments of radiant calm along the way, but finally the Dante Sonata drives to a dramatic and sonorous close.

Troisième Année, S.163

The third book of the Années de pèlerinage, which comes from late in Liszt’s life, is quite different from the first two, and it reflects the fact that his life in these years was in transition and in turmoil. Following his split from Marie d’Agoult, Liszt had begun a long affair with a young Russian woman, the Princess Carolyne zu-Sayn Wittgenstein (1819-1887), and by 1848 they were living together in Weimar, a fact that once again surrounded Liszt with scandal. Hounded by critics of both his musical ideas and his personal life, Liszt gave up the post of kapellmeister in Weimar in 1859 and moved the following year to Rome. He and the Princess Wittgenstein had hoped that her marriage could be annulled so that they could marry, but in 1861 came the crushing news that the marriage would not be annulled. Liszt soon took minor orders in the Catholic Church and lived for part of each year in the handsome Villa d’Este in Rome. Thereafter he divided his time between Rome, Weimar, and Budapest. He died at Bayreuth in 1886, and–overcome with grief–the Princess did not long survive him: she died seven months later.

Liszt composed the third book of the Années de pèlerinage at the Villa between 1867 and 1877, though it was not published until 1883, shortly before his death. The Villa d’Este is a handsome sixteenth-century villa built on a steep hillside in Tivoli. It is famous for its gardens and particularly for its fountains, which are of many different and elaborate designs and which stretch down the hillside. By the time Liszt lived there, the Villa had fallen into disrepair (it has since been renovated), but the fountains and gardens were intact, and they made a profound impression on the composer.

The third book of Années de pèlerinage consists of seven pieces, once again on Italian subjects but without the specific focus on works of art that unified the second book. Liszt’s late piano music is quite different from the virtuoso works of his youth, and audiences will find these seven pieces in many ways visionary–the sound is leaner, the harmonies experimental to the point of daring, and endings can feel curiously unresolved, as if Liszt is refusing to settle for traditional notions of harmonic resolution.

Several of the pieces in the third book have religious inspiration: the opening Angelus and the closing Sursum Corda (that title–the first line of an ancient prayer–translates “Lift up your hearts”). Sunt lacrymae verum is based in part on an ancient Hungarian scale.

The Funeral March, the earliest of the pieces in this set to be written, was composed in memory of the Emperor Maximilian, executed in Mexico in 1867.

By far the most famous of the pieces in the third book, however, are those that were in some way inspired by the Villa d’Este. Two were inspired by the cypresses on the grounds of the estate and certainly Respighi must have been aware of this music when, half a century later, he wrote his own music inspired by the pines and other aspects of Rome. Liszt called both of these pieces “threnodies”–a dirge or lamentation. Both are dark, and the opening of the second–with its unresolved harmonies–is one of the most striking moments in the collection.

The finest of the Villa d’Este pieces, however, is Les Jeux d’eau a la Villa d’Este (“Play of the Waters at the Villa d’Este”), a musical evocation of one of the sparkling fountains on the estate. This shimmering music would have a powerful influence a generation later on two young French composers who would write a great deal of similar “water” music: Debussy and Ravel (one of whose pieces is called Jeux d’eau). Liszt’s portrait of sunlight sparkling off the waters of the fountain seems pure impressionism: the swirling beginning gives way to more lyric ideas in the middle section. In the score at this point Liszt includes a quote from St. John: “But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I give him shall become in him a fountain of water springing up into eternal life.”