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

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
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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