Liszt: The Complete Songs, Vol. 2 - Angelika ... - Abeille Musique

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FRANZ LISZT, 1884 A pastel portrait by Franz von Lenbach (1836–1904) 2
T HE SONGS IN VOLUME 2 of Hyperion’s series of the complete songs of Franz Liszt span more than thirty years of the composer’s life, from the mid-1840s when Liszt was still in his ‘Glanzzeit’ (‘time of brilliance’, or his younger years as a virtuoso performer) to an old age saddened by losses and difficulties. From start to finish, however, Liszt’s songs display certain consistent concerns, including his trademark harmonic and tonal experimen - tation; his was an ongoing quest to imagine the future of music. He seems never to have regarded any setting of a poem as final and was more given to revision and re-composition than any other nineteenth-century song composer except Schubert. Dramatically different versions of a Goethe-Liszt song bracket this recording and make apparent the Pilgrim’s Progress from extroverted, lengthy and rich musical tendencies in earlier years to greater economy, austerity and inwardness in later life. Born in a German-speaking area of Hungary in 1811, he and his family departed for Paris in 1823, and he adopted French, German, Hungarian and Italian identities at different times in his life and to varying degrees. That extraordinary cosmopolitanism is reflected in his choices of song texts in six languages (three are represented here: French, German and Italian), ranging from the occasional amateur poem by those in his exalted aristocratic circles to the ‘greats’ of European poetry. These songs, in their subtlety and complexity, widen our understanding of a composer who can never again be pigeonholed or dismissed as ‘half gypsy, half priest’. * * * The manuscript for Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied I’, or Der du von dem Himmel bist, records that it was conceived ‘On the Ettersberg hillside. 12 February 1776’. The poem begins with a series of subordinate clauses, an acclamation that takes time to reach the heart of the 3 matter: the persona’s plea to be done with Faustian striving and find peace. The linguistic solecism whereby ‘pain and joy’ are bound together by a masculine article, despite the feminine gender of the second noun, affirms that pleasure and pain are opposite poles of the same thing—the human condition? Liszt, who knew what it was to pray for the soul’s peace, created four settings of this poem between 1842 and 1870 (the fourth version is incomplete); typically, the first version (track 1) is the longest, beginning with a brooding introduction in the piano before the singer enters with a quiet prayer. Thereafter, we alternate between invocations of ‘sweet peace’ and tonal convulsions of anguish (‘I am weary of this restlessness!’) in which the persona repeats the words of this brief poem over and over. The urgency of this plea cannot be doubted. Marling is a village in the South Tyrol (the northern - most part of Italy, bordered by Austria to the east and north) where the Viennese poet Emil Kuh, a friend and biographer of the greater writer Friedrich Hebbel, spent the last years of his life. For Liszt, who had taken minor orders in the Catholic Church in 1865, the poetic persona’s invocation of the church bell’s ‘sacred song’ inspired one of his most beautiful late lieder, Ihr Glocken von Marling. Here, the overtone series of church bells, the way in which their pulsating tones fill the air, become nonresolving seventh and ninth chords in a beautifully lyrical manifestation of Liszt’s tonal sophistication. The friendship between Liszt and the prickly genius Heinrich Heine was largely over by the time the first version of Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam was created, but even so Liszt could recognize the invitations to music in Heine’s unique poetic voice. Heine finds a memorable image for the fascination of German poets (fir trees in frozen climes) with exoticism (the palm tree on burning southern sands)—what a clever variation on the mountaintop perspective and the theme of the distant
Seite 1: Liszt THE COMPLETE SONGS VOLUME 2 A
Seite 5 und 6: Nachtlied II’, or Über allen Gip
Seite 7 und 8: and its spare texture, devoid of py
Seite 9 und 10: 4 Vergiftet sind meine Lieder My so
Seite 11 und 12: Et pourtant elle est éternelle, An
Seite 13 und 14: So auch blühtest du, Maria, So did
Seite 15 und 16: Es schweben Blumen und Englein Flow
Seite 17 und 18: Also available FRANZ LISZT (1811-18
Seite 19 und 20: JULIUS Drake The pianist Julius Dra
Seite 21 und 22: première version de Ein Fichtenbau
Seite 23 und 24: inspirées par la mort atroce de Je
Seite 25 und 26: Hohenlohe-Waldenburg (1817-1895). C
Seite 27 und 28: Obgleich die Freundschaft zwischen
Seite 29 und 30: so bezeichnend sind. Man hört zün
Seite 31 und 32: die Vergewaltigung der Natur zur Be
Seite 33: LISZT THE COMPLETE SONGS - 2 Hyperi

Liszt: The Complete Songs, Vol. 2 - Angelika ... - Abeille Musique

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