Description
tr.1. Vallée d’Obermann is named after Obermann, a novel by Etienne Pivert de Senancour. In this book, one of Liszt’s favourites, the hero sees nature in Switzerland as a mirror of his soul. Staying at the time in the same country, Liszt wrote his introspective ‘soundscape’ in 1837.
tr.2 & 3. Franz Liszt was a fervent reader. The poet Alphonse de Lamartine, in his Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, also inspired him: Cantique d’Amour, solemn and exalted, sounds like a harp; Andante lagrimoso is based on a poem about tears falling on a merciless soil.
Tr. 4. Liszt was in his sixties when he wrote for one of his pupils this youthful Impromptu, in his favourite “divine” key F- sharp Major.
After a fabulous but demanding career as “the greatist pianist ever” he had settled in Weimar (and brought it to a second bloom) first as conductor of the opera orchestra, later – returned from Rome as Abbé Liszt – as the famous teacher he also was.
Tr. 5 , 6 and 7 are transcriptions of his own “Lieder” (songs).
Tr. 5. Die Loreley, (text: Liszt’s friend Heinrich Heine) is remarkable for an at that time unusual sound: the chord that foreruns Wagner’s seventeen years (1861) later written Tristan-chord, considered to be the foundation of 20th-century music.
Tr. 6. Der König von Thule is written in the key of F Minor, with a short passage in A Major, where happy memories come into the mind of the old king.
Tr.7. Der du von dem Himmel bist (Thou who art from heaven), is a song on a well known text by Goethe: A prayer for (inner) peace.
Tr. 8, 9. Transcriptions of some of Frédéric Chopin’s Polnische Lieder (Polish Songs). Liszt made these transcriptions in 1857, eight years after Chopin died.
Tr.8. In Das Ringlein-Bacchanal Liszt combines two songs: one about sadness because of untrue love, and a song about drinking wine (to forget the cause?). Both songs have the character of folk dances.
Tr. 9. Meine Freuden (My Delights), Nocturne is an ode to a girl and ecstatically portrays in music the rapture of a kiss.
Tr.10. Gondoliera. Liszt heard in Venice in 1839 one of the gondolieri sing the popular tune La Biondina in Gondoletta. He made a notation of the melody. In 1861 he transcribed it and edited this evocation of “La Serenissima”.
Tr. 11. Liszt was a lover of the Italian opera. He admired Rossini and was impressed by his Soirées Musicales, a cycle of twelve Italian songs. He transcribed them for piano solo in order to promote them, and to get the attention of the opera-minded public in Milan turned towards the piano. La Regatta Veneziana is one of those pieces. It is a convincing picture of the spectacular annual event in Venice.
