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

eminiscences of folksong-like melody for the singer
(although accompanied by progressive harmonies), pomp
and circumstance for the king’s last banquet with his
knights, and a dramatic descent into a watery grave.
Liszt shunned song cycles but would on occasion group
two or three songs on texts by the same poet. One example
is the Muttergottes-Sträusslein zum Mai-Monate by
the Aachen poet Joseph Müller, based on the medieval
tradition of the ‘Mary Garden’ planted with flowers
symbolic of the Virgin’s qualities. In a letter to Carolyne
on 22 May 1857, Liszt recounted Müller’s gift of ‘a small
miscellany of Catholic poetry’, and on 2 August he
announced his intention of setting two poems ‘which will
have the simplicity of the rosary’: ‘Das Veilchen’ (‘The
violet’, ‘Our Lady’s Modesty’) and ‘Die Schlüsselblumen’
(‘The cowslips’, ‘Our Lady’s Keys’, symbolic of ‘winning
grace’). In ‘Das Veilchen’ Liszt directs the singer to sing
half-voice and indicates that a harmonium can be used
in place of a piano. The ultra-Romantic progression of
harmonies that rise by the interval of a third appears in the
interior of each stanza. ‘Winning grace’ is evident in the
piano introduction of ‘Die Schlüsselblumen’, linked in
various harmonic ways to the song of the violet.
Scattered amidst the settings of great poets in the roster
of Liszt’s songs are those to texts by contemporaries
now largely unknown. Und sprich sets a small poem by
Rüdiger von Biegeleben, son of the diplomat Baron Ludwig
von Biegeleben, a statesman who opposed Otto Bismarck
and advocated for Austrian leadership in the German Con -
federation. Here, the poetic persona exhorts some one—
his or her own inner self?—to look at the play of light
and shadow on the sea and draw lessons about sorrow,
fortune and God from the sight. This meditative setting
from the mid-1870s is a perfect example of the late Liszt’s
exercises in economy without ever sacrificing his lifelong
genius at creating arresting harmonic progres sions. The
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accompaniment is shot through with silences that allow
the singer’s sacral admonitions to come through clearly.
Ihr Auge (‘Nimm einen Strahl der Sonne’) is a brief,
passionate outcry of a song. The combined illumination of
Nature’s brightest lights—the sun, the evening star, the
glowing lava from Mount Etna—cannot equal the light of
the beloved’s eyes, which can warm and illuminate but
also destroy the lover’s soul. The gasping urgency in the
piano figuration at the beginning, the brief enharmonic
shift to distinguish ‘inner life’ from external Nature, and
an ‘ending’ that sounds remarkably un-final: these are
recurring Lisztian hallmarks. This much passion, Liszt
tells us, has an afterlife beyond the final bar.
Where Robert Schumann drew on the idea of
reflections in the water for his setting of Heinrich Heine’s
Im Rhein, im schönen Strome, in the song cycle
Dichterliebe, Op 48, Liszt paints rippling waters and the
fluttering of angels’ wings. In the revised version recorded
here—the first version is on Volume 1—the waters flow
in gentler, less virtuosic manner; one notes again the
chiming chords in the treble register indicative of Liszt’s
‘ethereal’ or ‘angelic’ strain of music. Poem and song were
born of one of the great building projects of the nineteenth
century: the completion of Cologne Cathedral (officially
the Hohe Domkirche St Peter und Maria), begun in 1248
but left unfinished in the early sixteenth century. In 1814
the future Prussian monarch Friedrich Wilhelm IV first
resolved to see to its completion, and the actual building
began in 1842, two years after he assumed the throne. For
a time both Liszt and Heine were involved in fundraising
efforts for the cathedral, the deeply Catholic Liszt more so
than the poet. The image of the Virgin in this song refers to
a famous panel on a retable altarpiece painted by the late
Gothic painter Stephan Lochner in the 1440s.
Es muss ein Wunderbares sein is one of Liszt’s most
popular songs, given its merger of sophisticated harmonies