Liszt: The Complete Songs, Vol. 2 - Angelika ... - Abeille Musique
Liszt: The Complete Songs, Vol. 2 - Angelika ... - Abeille Musique
Liszt: The Complete Songs, Vol. 2 - Angelika ... - Abeille Musique
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T HE<br />
SONGS IN VOLUME 2 of Hyperion’s series of the<br />
complete songs of Franz <strong>Liszt</strong> span more than thirty<br />
years of the composer’s life, from the mid-1840s<br />
when <strong>Liszt</strong> was still in his ‘Glanzzeit’ (‘time of brilliance’,<br />
or his younger years as a virtuoso performer) to an old age<br />
saddened by losses and difficulties. From start to finish,<br />
however, <strong>Liszt</strong>’s songs display certain consistent concerns,<br />
including his trademark harmonic and tonal experimen -<br />
tation; his was an ongoing quest to imagine the future<br />
of music. He seems never to have regarded any setting of<br />
a poem as final and was more given to revision and<br />
re-composition than any other nineteenth-century song<br />
composer except Schubert. Dramatically different versions<br />
of a Goethe-<strong>Liszt</strong> song bracket this recording and make<br />
apparent the Pilgrim’s Progress from extroverted, lengthy<br />
and rich musical tendencies in earlier years to greater<br />
economy, austerity and inwardness in later life. Born in a<br />
German-speaking area of Hungary in 1811, he and his<br />
family departed for Paris in 1823, and he adopted French,<br />
German, Hungarian and Italian identities at different<br />
times in his life and to varying degrees. That extraordinary<br />
cosmopolitanism is reflected in his choices of song texts<br />
in six languages (three are represented here: French,<br />
German and Italian), ranging from the occasional amateur<br />
poem by those in his exalted aristocratic circles to the<br />
‘greats’ of European poetry. <strong>The</strong>se songs, in their subtlety<br />
and complexity, widen our understanding of a composer<br />
who can never again be pigeonholed or dismissed as ‘half<br />
gypsy, half priest’.<br />
* * *<br />
<strong>The</strong> manuscript for Goethe’s ‘Wandrers Nachtlied I’, or<br />
Der du von dem Himmel bist, records that it was<br />
conceived ‘On the Ettersberg hillside. 12 February 1776’.<br />
<strong>The</strong> poem begins with a series of subordinate clauses, an<br />
acclamation that takes time to reach the heart of the<br />
3<br />
matter: the persona’s plea to be done with Faustian striving<br />
and find peace. <strong>The</strong> linguistic solecism whereby ‘pain and<br />
joy’ are bound together by a masculine article, despite the<br />
feminine gender of the second noun, affirms that pleasure<br />
and pain are opposite poles of the same thing—the<br />
human condition? <strong>Liszt</strong>, who knew what it was to pray<br />
for the soul’s peace, created four settings of this poem<br />
between 1842 and 1870 (the fourth version is incomplete);<br />
typically, the first version (track 1) is the longest,<br />
beginning with a brooding introduction in the piano<br />
before the singer enters with a quiet prayer. <strong>The</strong>reafter, we<br />
alternate between invocations of ‘sweet peace’ and tonal<br />
convulsions of anguish (‘I am weary of this restlessness!’)<br />
in which the persona repeats the words of this brief poem<br />
over and over. <strong>The</strong> urgency of this plea cannot be doubted.<br />
Marling is a village in the South Tyrol (the northern -<br />
most part of Italy, bordered by Austria to the east and<br />
north) where the Viennese poet Emil Kuh, a friend and<br />
biographer of the greater writer Friedrich Hebbel, spent the<br />
last years of his life. For <strong>Liszt</strong>, who had taken minor orders<br />
in the Catholic Church in 1865, the poetic persona’s<br />
invocation of the church bell’s ‘sacred song’ inspired one<br />
of his most beautiful late lieder, Ihr Glocken von<br />
Marling. Here, the overtone series of church bells, the way<br />
in which their pulsating tones fill the air, become nonresolving<br />
seventh and ninth chords in a beautifully lyrical<br />
manifestation of <strong>Liszt</strong>’s tonal sophistication.<br />
<strong>The</strong> friendship between <strong>Liszt</strong> and the prickly genius<br />
Heinrich Heine was largely over by the time the first<br />
version of Ein Fichtenbaum steht einsam was created,<br />
but even so <strong>Liszt</strong> could recognize the invitations to music<br />
in Heine’s unique poetic voice. Heine finds a memorable<br />
image for the fascination of German poets (fir trees in<br />
frozen climes) with exoticism (the palm tree on burning<br />
southern sands)—what a clever variation on the<br />
mountaintop perspective and the theme of the distant