Cédric Tiberghien - Liszt: Années de pèlerinage, troisième année & Other Late Piano Works (2019)

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Cédric Tiberghien - Liszt: Années de pèlerinage, troisième année & Other Late Piano Works (2019)

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Liszt, according to the great British pianist John Ogdon, was responsible for ‘breaking the Germanic stranglehold on nineteenth-century composers, and scattering the seeds of modern music almost literally to the four winds. His music shows an avant-garde attitude to the problems of composing which was without parallel in the nineteenth century.’

Cédric Tiberghien’s survey of Liszt’s late piano works provides compelling evidence to support Ogdon’s view, beginning with one of his most intriguing miniatures. The manuscript title page of what is now known as the Bagatelle sans tonalité proclaims it to be the Mephisto Waltz No 4; ‘Bagatelle without tonality’ is the subtitle. In the event, Liszt decided to give that title to the composition (left unfinished) we hear on track 3. Both works were written in 1885 (and both remained unpublished for eighty years). We are in the same unsettling world of Nikolaus Lenau’s Faust that Liszt had first depicted in the famous Mephisto Waltz No 1, completed twenty-three years earlier. Indeed, there are glimpses of its material and ideas in the Bagatelle, which proceeds in an episodic manner and concludes in the strangest fashion: an upward rush of twenty-five diminished seventh chords growing in volume and ending (of course!) without resolving the tonality of the piece.

Liszt completed his Wiegenlied (‘Cradle song’) on 18 May 1881 in Weimar and dedicated it (‘freundlichst dankend, F. Liszt’) to his pupil Arthur Friedheim who was to become his amanuensis the following year. It is a work of extreme economy and childlike simplicity—just three pages long—but which clearly had some hidden significance for Liszt, for he not only arranged it for the unusual combination of four violins (entitled Die Wiege—‘The cradle’) but also used it for the opening of his final (thirteenth) symphonic poem Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe (‘From the cradle to the grave’, 1881-2). Wiegenlied was not published until 1958, and Friedheim makes no mention of it in his memoir Life and Liszt.

Liszt returned to the Faust legend some twenty years after the Mephisto Waltz No 1 with the completion of the second Mephisto Waltz in early 1881. He added the third Mephisto Waltz two years later and, as we have seen, was working on the Mephisto Waltz No 4 the year before his death. The music begins in D major but ends on a bare unison octave C sharp. The satanic drive of the earlier Waltzes remains, but the dance element seems to have vanished along with any discernible tonality.

The contemplative, internal musings characteristic of this period in Liszt’s life are vividly present in La lugubre gondola II. He stayed with his son-in-law Richard Wagner at the Palazzo Vendramin on the Grand Canal in Venice at the end of 1882 and became engrossed by the silent funeral processions passing along the canals by gondola. He subsequently admitted that he had had a premonition of Wagner’s death, an event which occurred just six weeks later in Venice. It affected him deeply and inspired four pieces: two versions of La lugubre gondola, RW – Venezia and Am Grabe Richard Wagners. One can easily imagine the wizened and disillusioned composer sitting at the piano in solitude in the fading evening light toying with these eerie thoughts. Like La lugubre gondola I, it reaches heights of desolation through harmonic disorientation and austere dissonances, devoid of any recognizable theme, rhythm or tonality.

Equally unconventional in content and structure is Schlaflos! Frage und Antwort (‘Sleepless! Question and answer’): a nocturne, so the score tells us, ‘after a poem by Toni Raab’. Antonia Raab (1846-1902), later Madame de Retz, was a fellow Hungarian and favourite pupil of Liszt’s, though her poem has never been traced. Schlaflos! was written in March 1883, not long after Wagner’s death, though it was not published until 1927. The ‘question’ is in E minor; the ‘answer’, over an insistent E natural pedal point, is in E major (see the note below on Sursum corda). The answer, the music implies, is in the question. Whatever the question might be, the sleeper seems happy to return to the arms of Morpheus by the work’s conclusion, for which Liszt helpfully provided a harmonized ossia should his contemporaries (unlike Mr Tiberghien on this recording) have found the bare single notes too uncomfortably severe.

En rêve (‘Dreaming’) is another nocturne—but how different in scope and character to Schlaflos!—and was composed in 1885. A beautifully sculpted melody over a broken chord accompaniment puts one in mind, initially, of Chopin. There is in this little gem, unlike in many of the works from the last years of Liszt’s life, nothing disillusioned or bleak, but rather a note of acceptance and reconciliation.

The second part of Mr Tiberghien’s programme is devoted to the third and final volume of Années de pèlerinage. The seven pieces were written in the decade before the works preceding them in this recital (i.e. between 1867 and 1877, when Liszt was in his sixties), though not published in their final form until 1883. The first volume, première année – Suisse, had eventually been completed in 1854; the deuxième année – Italie was published in 1858; and most of the music that forms these two collections originated during travels with Marie d’Agoult in 1838 and 1839. The troisième année is different in every respect. First, the individual pieces were written in a single location: Liszt had the use of a suite of rooms at the Villa d’Este, a sixteenth-century mansion in Tivoli, some twenty miles from Rome and the home of his friend Cardinal Hohenlohe. Second, the dazzling years of the travelling virtuoso who had inflamed Europe with his playing were long behind him. So, too, by and large, were the virtuoso piano compositions. Sacred works dominated. In April 1865, Liszt had received the tonsure and the first of the minor orders of the Catholic Church from Gustav Hohenlohe, beginning his new life as ‘the Abbé Liszt’. In life, as in music, everything was now pared down. Even more than the depictions of the scenes and sounds of their titles, the seven pieces of the troisième année are reflections of Liszt’s own moods and feelings at this time.

Angelus! Prière aux anges gardiens (‘Angelus! Prayer to the guardian angels’) comes first in the collection but was among the last to be composed (1877), an evocation of the Angelus bells heard across Rome in the evening. Liszt indicates that the piece can be played on the piano or harmonium, and at the climax even offers an alternative eight bars if the latter is used. He also made an arrangement of Angelus! for string quartet.

‘My cypresses have grown taller,’ he wrote to his confidante Baroness Olga von Meyendorff on 14 October 1877. ‘I’ve been working on them without interruption for about ten days … They are hardly suitable for drawing rooms and are not entertaining, nor even dreamily pleasing. When I publish them, I’ll warn the publisher that he risks selling only a few copies.’ The first of the two Aux cyprès de la Villa d’Este pieces was inspired by the cypress trees in the gardens of the Villa d’Este, said to be the largest in Italy. The second Thrénodie (i.e. ‘lament’) depicted the cypresses at the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli in Rome, said to have been planted by Michelangelo, but Liszt changed the title to match the first when he found that this was not the case.

Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este (‘The fountains of the Villa d’Este’), another tone poem composed in 1877, is the only piece from the set to have entered the standard piano repertoire. It is one of the greatest water pieces in music, among Liszt’s most original compositions and one of the few virtuosic pieces from this period of his life. It evokes the extended series of waterworks and fountains in the park surrounding the villa built in the sixteenth century by the architect Pirro Ligorio for the governor of Tivoli, Cardinal Ippolite d’Este. Just as cypress trees are associated with loss and grief (it’s believed that the cross on which Jesus was crucified was made, in part, from cypress wood), so fountains represent the ‘living water’ of the Gospels. Indeed, at bar 144, when the music modulates into D major (4'12 on this recording), Liszt inserts a quote from the Gospel According to St John (4:14): ‘but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.’ The harmonies conjured up by Liszt foreshadow Ravel’s Jeux d’eau and other twentieth-century water pieces.

In subdued and lugubrious contrast, the fifth piece in the collection was originally entitled ‘Thrénodie hongroise’ (‘Hungarian lament’). Liszt later renamed it Sunt lacrymae rerum and added the subtitle ‘in Hungarian mode’, as the music uses the so-called Hungarian scale and the dotted march rhythm familiar in so much Hungarian music. Its title is a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid referring to the fall of Troy which translates as ‘There are tears for things’. Here, Liszt associates it with the Hungarian War of Independence of 1848-9. Composed in 1872, he dedicated the piece to his erstwhile son-in-law and pupil Hans von Bülow.

Even gloomier and more desolate, Marche funèbre is the earliest piece in this volume of Années de pèlerinage. It was written in 1867, the same year as the event which it commemorates—the execution of Emperor Maximilian I of Mexico. He was a Habsburg, the younger brother of the Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph I. When President Juarez’s revolutionaries overthrew him and sentenced him to death by firing squad, many of the crowned heads of Europe wrote to Juarez begging him to spare his life. Liszt prefaces the score with another quotation, this from Propertius: ‘In magnis et voluisse sat est’ (‘in great affairs it is enough even to have been willing’).

Finally, from around 1877, comes Sursum corda (usually translated as ‘Lift up your hearts’), words from the Preface to the Mass. Musically, it has the unusual feature (but see track 5) that apart from the introduction, the octave bars before the climax and the coda, every bar has a pedal point of E (E major being Liszt’s favoured ‘religious’ key). The music works itself up into a fff declamation spread over four staves, concluding with four grandioso measures of E major chords.

Is this an optimistic ending to the troisième année, the exultant triumph of the will over adversity? Or does it end in pessimism with an outburst of frustration and despair? Whatever one’s response, there is no disputing that this final volume of Années de pèlerinage presages the later tonal experiments of the first half of this programme and, with their forward-looking harmonies and sinister dissonances, represents that which would, as John Ogdon put it, ‘scatter the seeds of modern music to the four winds’.