The spiritual and the mystical coloured Liszt’s life, from growing up in Habsburg Hungary, through his years as a journeying transcendental pianist in the 1830s/40s – Europe’s greatest – to joining the Third Order of St Francis in 1857, eight years later becoming an Abbé. Unreconcilable as it was for many, he was as much a man of the cloth as lord of the earth – both the alter and campfire his shrines of existence. ‘He who acknowledges God does not value the Devil less’ (Busoni). An occasion in October 1846 saw him ‘paying a visit to the bishop … but sending for the gypsies in the evening’. Their ‘class of music,’ he wrote to Ödön Singer, Hungarian concertmaster of his Weimar orchestra, ‘is, for me, a kind of opium, of which I am sometimes in great need’ (1 August 1855). He was exalted by the matter of their art, bewitched by the manner of their artistry. An unfettered people transforming the music of strangers and places into their own, slave to no printed page, their memory their fortune. Balancing his lifestyle, lapses and secularism with ecclesiastical values and example brought its frictions, contradictions and trespasses, particularly during his pre-Weimar years. His piety nevertheless, recognising ‘the inscrutable will of God’, was grounded early on, in his teens. He briefly brushed with Saint-Simonism. During the long vie trifurquée phase divided between Weimar, Pest and Rome – in Derek Watson’s evocation the ‘dusk and dawn’ of Liszt’s life from 1869 to 1886 – the church, attending morning Mass, clerical collar and black cassock polarised his being and appearance. Turning to Scriptures at the candle-hour was as necessary as keeping in step with Darwin, natural selection, and La Revue scientifique. ‘I cannot believe in [Raphael’s portrayal of] God […] But I do believe in a personified, or, if you like, person-less justice which compensates for all that happens here on earth […] an immense, unfathomable mystery’ (to Gerhard Rohlfs, 1877). His entering the church bewildered many. His mother wept at the news. His son-in-law, Émile Ollivier, called it ‘spiritual suicide’. Yet, on Liszt’s own admission, ‘in the severe sense of the word’, monkhood was never in contention. As his biographer Alan Walker notes, ‘he could not celebrate Mass, nor could he hear confession. He undertook no vows of celibacy, was free to marry, and was able at any time to retract’ (Franz Liszt – Volume 3: The Final Years, 1861–1886, 1996). ‘Convinced as I was that this act would strengthen me in the right road,’ he wrote to Prince Constantin von Hohenzollern- Hechingen, ‘I accomplished it without effort, in all simplicity and uprightness of intention. Moreover, it agrees with all the antecedents of my youth, as well as with the development that [my] musical composition has taken during [recent] years […] which I propose to pursue with fresh vigour, as I consider it the least defective form of my nature’ (11 May 1865).

Around five per cent of Liszt’s output – transcriptions and arrangements aside – centred around religious-themed works. In the 1830s he fancied uniting theatre and church ‘on a colossal scale’. Two decades later he believed he might become the Palestrina of his age. His master statements, covering a period roughly from the late 1840s to the late 1870s, were imposingly conceived – among them psalm settings Die Legende von der Heiligen Elisabeth, the Christus oratorio (‘my musical Will and Testament’), the Graner Mass, Requiem, Ungarische Krönungsmesse, Die heilige Cäcilia and Via Crucis. A handful of focussed piano poems, not to mention numerous incidental references or episodic allusions spanning more than 50 years, magicked theology wondrously into the recital room – most famously the two Franciscan Legends (1863, subsequently orchestrated), Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude from the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses after Lamartine (1847), and numbers from the third volume of the Années de pèlerinage (published in 1883).

Liszt the transcriber-paraphraser-metamorphoser – Western civilisation’s finest – ranged copiously and historically, from the 1500s to his own time. From Palestrina and Lassus through Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, to Chopin, Berlioz and Wagner. From pulpit to podium, symphony to Italian opera and German song. The world was his for the taking, no empire or kingdom, neither the profound nor profane beyond his curiosity or translator’s pen. In the mansions of his mind lofty voices and alluring spectres – Paris to St Petersburg, Aragon to Constantinople, Hungary to the Balkans – met, crossed and mingled without frontier.

‘The piano is the microcosm of music’
– Liszt, 18 December 1877

***

Cantico del Sol di San Francesco d’Assisi S499

Cantico del Sol di San Francesco d’Assisi, S499/R191 (1881 [?1880–82]) Text from St Francis of Assisi – Laudes Creaturarum (‘Canticle of the Sun’) F major. Orbiting the medieval Christmas chorale In dulci jubilo, this hymn comes in alternatively organised accounts and truncations – principally for (a) baritone, optional male chorus, piano/organ/harmonium (Rome 1862, Cantico di San Francesco); and (b) baritone, male chorus, organ, orchestra (Weimar 1879–81, Cantico del Sol di Francesco d’Assisi, premiered in Pressburg/Bratislava, 21 December 1884).¹ The piano version integrates elements from both the Weimar revision and unpublished 1862 autograph. 'Praised be my Lord God with all his creatures, and specially our brother the sun, who brings us the day and who brings us the light; fair is he and shines with a very great splendour: O Lord, he signifies to us thee! Praised be my Lord for our sister the moon, and for the stars, the which he has set clear and lovely in heaven' (Matthew Arnold’s translation, Essays in Criticism, 1865.)

San Francesco S498d

San Francesco, S498d/R392 ‘Preludio per il Cantico del Sol di San Francesco d’Assisi’ (Siena, 17–20 September 1880) F major. In character more sketch (in three and four time) than finished article, this condenses, re-orders and re-focusses the canticle and its In dulci jubilo framework in just under half its 1862 length. Liszt wrote it out in the Villa Torre Fiorentina, a palazzo near Siena, while staying briefly with the Wagners, Richard and Cosima, embracing the ‘fond’ attentions of his grandchildren.

Excelsior! S500

Excelsior!, S500/R337 ‘Preludio zu den Glocken des Strassburger Münsters’ (c. 1874–76 [?1869–75]) E major. The Bells of Strasburg Cathedral for mezzo-soprano, baritone, mixed chorus and orchestra was based on the prologue to Longfellow’s 1851 dramatic poem The Golden Legend (set also by Arthur Sullivan shortly after he met with Liszt in London in 1886). ‘The Spire of Strasburg Cathedral. Night and storm. Lucifer, with the Powers of the Air, [tries] to tear down the Cross.’ The voices of the bells repel the forces of evil. Dedicated to the poet, the first performance was given in the Vigadó, Budapest on 10 March 1875, opening a concert conducted by Wagner, with Liszt playing Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. Liszt himself directed it – in the opinion of one member of the audience (Henselt’s Estonian friend Georg von Schultz) ‘a good deal of noise, much ado about nothing’. Wagner’s Grundthema (Hans von Wolzogen’s 1891 Abendmahlthema, Liebesmahlspruch) launching the Act I Prelude to Parsifal tellingly shares its initial notes and slow tempo: ‘Wagner once reminded me of the similarity of his Parsifal theme and my previously written Excelsior’ (Am Grabe Richard Wagners manuscript, Weimar, 22 May 1883). Sanctioned officially, the vocal score’s piano reduction doubles as the present a capella solo.

Die sieben Todsünden von Adalbert von Goldschmidt: Fantasiestück S490

Liebesszene und fortunas Kugel aus dem oratorium Die sieben Todsünden von Adalbert von Goldschmidt. Fantasiestück, S490/R165 (1880). A disciple of Liszt and Wagner, the Jewish-Viennese composer, poet and satirist Adalbert von Goldschmidt (1848–1906) was a friend of Hugo Wolf and Bruckner. A discerning practitioner and patron of the arts, politically and socially conscious, he worked originally for the Rothschilds (his father governing their Viennese banking wing), living to see the rise of Mahler and Schoenberg, Klimt and the Secessionists before meeting his end in solitude. Seen by many as a Judas within Brahms’s Austrian stronghold, he wasn’t without vitriolic enemies, Hanslick for one, inevitably. But Liszt supported him, and an entry in Heinrich Schenker’s diary notes ‘[his] picture and songs, the scent of which lingers as a last remembrance’ (9 January 1907). His salon, Opernring 6, enriched Sunday afternoons, nurturing Vienna’s free spirits and burgeoning fin de siècle modernists. ‘With him,’ believed Karl Kraus, ‘died one of those rare people whose value to recognise is not an ability that requires knowledge of their subject, but a matter of cultural feeling.’ Fruit of a young man in his late twenties, predating his operas, the three-part allegorical drama/oratorio The Seven Deadly Sins (1876), dedicated to Liszt and inspired by Hans Makart’s lionised if controversial 1868 painting The Plague in Florence, was premiered in Berlin on 3 May 1876. To a libretto by Richard Metzdorff, it’s a tonally complex, texturally dense, orchestrally enveloping score, more than a little indebted to Wagnerian vocabulary and techniques, along with parodistic elements. The harmonically expanded Love Scene from Part II, fading into arpeggiated D major, forms the lyrical opening half of Liszt’s Fantasiestück, Tristan’s Isolde from afar, maidenly in her tresses and turns. Ghosted by Liszt’s Wilde Jagd, Fortuna’s Ball comes from the Greed Scene – C major music which Liszt cadences dramatically in unison Bs and C sharps of no fixed abode.

Deux Transcriptions d’apres Rossini S553

Deux Transcriptions d’apres Rossini, S553/R238 (1847) A flat major; E major. Lamartine considered Liszt ‘a metaphysical musician, similar to […] Mozart and Beethoven: he sings more the symphonies of heaven then the melodies of earth; he has nothing in common with Rossini. Rossini sings of sensations and intoxications; he has more verve then sensitivity: he is the Boccaccio of music […] Beethoven and Liszt are […] aerial spirits. Rossini is more man: they are more angels.’ (Cours familier de literature, Vol. 10, 1860). Liszt’s 1838 arrangement of the William Tell overture, like his Tannhäuser counterpart ten years later, is embedded among the warhorses of transcendental pianism. Not so mighty but as distinctively cut, his pair of Transcriptions d’après Rossini address the tenor aria Cujus animam from the post-operatic Stabat Mater (1841); and La Charité, the third of Rossini’s three Choeurs religieux published in Paris in 1844 to words by Louise Colet, Flaubert’s future lover.

Harmonie nach Rossini’s Carita (La Charité) S701j

Harmonie nach Rossini’s Carita (La Charité), S701j (1847) (fragments). Intended at one stage for inclusion in the ur-version of the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses anthology, two previous 1847 drafts of La Charité from the Deux Transcriptions survive: Caritas S552a, first version; La carità S552b, second version (simplified). This is an unfinished sketch.

À la Chapelle Sixtine S461

À la Chapelle Sixtine, S461/R114 ‘Miserere d’Allegri et Ave verum corpus de Mozart’ (1862) (first version, ed. L. Howard). Here, paraphrase/fantasia-like, two works are combined, reworked and variously transposed. (a) The opening of Gregorio Allegri’s double-choir Miserere mei, Deuswritten during the reign (1623–44) of Pope Urban VIII for the Tenebrae services of Holy Week (‘Have mercy on me, O God’). (b) Mozart’s Ave verum corpus motet K.618 composed in 1791 for the feast of Corpus Christi, observed that year on 23 June (‘Hail, True Body’). ‘In the Miserere the anguish and wretchedness of Man finds voice; in the Ave verum corpus the infinite mercy and grace of God answers in song. This touches upon the sublimest of mysteries; to Him who shows us Love triumphant over Evil and Death’ (Liszt to the Grand Duke Carl Alexander of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Rome, 1 November 1862). Leslie Howard (1998) observes that the original manuscript (Goethe-Schiller Archive, Weimar) ‘shows a great deal of reworking and cancelled first thoughts […] The early version outstrips the later in the level of terror raised at the climax of the Miserere.’

Ave verum corpus de Mozart S461a

Ave verum corpus de Mozart, S461a (c. 1861 [?1862,1867]) B major. ‘A cadence to an excerpt’ from À la Chapelle Sixtine (Howard, 1993), less literal than Liszt’s 1886 D major organ arrangement.

Agnus Dei de la Messe de Requiem de Giuseppe Verdi S437

Agnus Dei de la Messe de Requiem de Giuseppe Verdi, S437/R270 (1877–82 [?1877–78]) (second version) C major. Liszt’s Verdi transcriptions (paraphrases, réminiscences) are an encircling, personal response to the Italian’s operatic genius, here respectful, there elaborately re-shaped and repainted, mood, atmosphere, psychological nuance and individualised interpretation carrying the moment. That Liszt and the domestic parlour rarely shared ground pianistically little bothered his publishers … nor Verdi’s. But here he simplified his writing to poetically expressive effect, purged of excess in its ‘white’ clarity.

© 2024

¹ See Jorge Luis Modolell, Musical and Spiritual Meaning in the Franciscan Works of Franz Liszt, PhD thesis, University of Washington in St Louis, 2023.