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

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