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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Nachtlied II’, or Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’, is one of the<br />
greatest masterpieces of German verse—but it is. Written<br />
on 6 September 1780 on the wall of a wooden hut at the<br />
peak of the Kickelhahn mountain near Ilmenau, it begins<br />
by evoking the onset of night and then transforms ‘evening’<br />
into the imminent end of life. In the quiet chords whose<br />
roots descend by thirds in the piano at the beginning of<br />
<strong>Liszt</strong>’s second version, we hear musical peace descend on<br />
the landscape. In the repetitions of the poet’s final lines, we<br />
hear a crescendo of longing, urgency, and perhaps a touch<br />
of fearfulness that cedes to the invocation of ultimate<br />
peace, bringing back the harmonies of the beginning on a<br />
higher plane.<br />
Alfred de Musset’s La confession d’un enfant du siècle<br />
(1836) and his 1840 sonnet ‘Tristesse’ or ‘Sadness’—<br />
<strong>Liszt</strong>’s text for J’ai perdu ma force et ma vie—define<br />
the so-called ‘mal du siècle’, a compound of ennui, melan -<br />
choly, apathy, and distaste for life. In a letter of condolence<br />
to the wife of Alexei Tolstoy (second cousin to Leo Tolstoy)<br />
in 1875, <strong>Liszt</strong> quoted the closing lines of Musset’s poem,<br />
in which life is summed up as weeping. Chromatically<br />
clouded, dramatic-emphatic ‘sighing figures’ fill the<br />
piano introduction before the singer enters with an<br />
unaccompanied, recitative-like passage, typical of <strong>Liszt</strong>’s<br />
late songs. This work is also emblematic of <strong>Liszt</strong> in its<br />
interior ‘ethereal’ treble passage evoking the eternal and its<br />
exploration of tonal ambivalence: we end in mid-air.<br />
One of <strong>Liszt</strong>’s most dramatic late songs is his setting of<br />
Alexandre Dumas père’s scene Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher,<br />
one of many works inspired by Joan of Arc’s hideous death<br />
at the age of nineteen. <strong>The</strong> peasant girl from eastern France<br />
whose victories in battle made possible the coronation of<br />
Charles VII did not become an official Catholic saint until<br />
1920, but she was a significant figure in European culture<br />
long before then (Friedrich Schiller’s play <strong>The</strong> Maid of<br />
Orléans is one example). <strong>Liszt</strong> had hoped to persuade first<br />
5<br />
Dumas, then Gérard de Nerval, to create a Faust libretto for<br />
him, but had to settle for this shorter nugget of dramatic<br />
verse on a different subject. His music exists in several<br />
different versions, three for voice and piano, beginning in<br />
1846 and concluding three decades later. In this final<br />
revision the song begins in slow, agonized uncertainty and<br />
then progresses to a beautifully transparent prayer whose<br />
invocation of God’s spirit (‘Votre Esprit’) impels one of<br />
<strong>Liszt</strong>’s signature arresting harmonic shifts. We hear<br />
flickering flames in the piano and rising passages as she<br />
ascends to the funeral pyre, this in turn followed by<br />
another tender prayer whose intermittent triplet figures in<br />
the left hand foreshadow the clarion trumpet calls to hold<br />
the banner of France as she goes to her death. <strong>Liszt</strong> ends<br />
this dramatic scene not with bombast but with music that<br />
tells of the saint’s ascension into heaven.<br />
‘<strong>The</strong> time has come for me (Nel mezzo del cammin di<br />
nostra vita [Midway through the journey of life]—thirtyfive<br />
years old!) to break out of my virtuoso’s chrysalis<br />
and allow my thoughts unfettered flight’, <strong>Liszt</strong> wrote,<br />
paraphrasing Dante’s Virgil, as he prepared to walk away<br />
from one of the most glittering concert careers in the<br />
history of music and move to Weimar—Goethe’s city—<br />
where he settled in 1848. For any Goethe-loving song<br />
composer, Faust was an inevitable source of inspiration,<br />
especially when its characters sing. In the eighth scene<br />
(entitled ‘Evening’) of Part I, the village girl Gretchen sings<br />
Es war ein König in Thule just before she discovers<br />
the casket of jewels that Faust and the diabolical<br />
Mephistopheles have left for her. ‘Ultima Thule’ was the<br />
legendary name for the ends of the earth, and this tiny<br />
ballad tells of a king faithful to his beloved beyond her<br />
death. Schubert had earlier told this tale in a pseudoantique,<br />
starkly skeletal song (D367). <strong>Liszt</strong>’s second<br />
version, by contrast, tracks every twist and turn of the<br />
story in episodic ballad manner, complete with wistful