Liszt: The Complete Music for Solo Piano, Vol.20 - Album d'un voyageur

Castle on a stream (1820) by Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781-1841) CDA66601/2 Recording details: March 1992 St Martin's Church, East Woodhay, Berkshire, United Kingdom Produced by Tryggvi Tryggvason Engineered by Tryggvi Tryggvason Release date: November 1992 DISCID: 7A102008 B711340E Total duration: 141 minutes 9 seconds LISZT SOCIETY GRAND PRIX, BUDAPEST 'Marvellous stuff and quite impeccably recorded' (CDReview) 'This album is one of the supreme rewards of Howard's Liszt traversal. Sound is transparently immediate, and the artist's annotations guide one surely and elegantly through these amazing riches - which you must hear' (Fanfare, USA) The Album d’un Voyageur is the first important published collection of Liszt’s early maturity and, although much of the collection was to be revised and the rest unaccountably discarded, it remains a significant body of work because of its daring originality and for setting the scene for much of Liszt’s creative process in its mixture of original works, transcriptions and fantasies, and with its incorporation of folk-music material or other composers’ themes. Liszt’s inner necessity to arrive at new forms during the actual procedure of composition and through the transformation of themes, rather than by a conscious decision to adopt a standard form at the outset, is a characteristic of his entire life’s work. The very few pieces, outside simple dances and marches, where a standard formal structure is identified in his titles transpire to be a good deal more original in form than those titles might suggest. One need look no further than the Faust and Dante Symphonies, the Sonata or the ‘Weinen, Klagen’ Variations for confirmation. Of course this does not mean than Liszt’s approach to form is haphazard, but that it must be considered quite differently from the classical moulds which he eschewed. This ‘open form’, as Alfred Brendel so aptly defines it (in Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts) is found from the beginning in the three Apparitions, in the early single piece entitled Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, and in the whole of the Album d’un voyageur. The travelling to which the title of the collection alludes concerns the period beginning with the flight of Liszt and the Countess Marie d’Agoult from Paris and their sojourn in Switzerland. This notorious liaison with a married member of the French aristocracy necessitated the journey, and Marie’s subsequent pregnancies and the births of Blandine, Cosima and Daniel prolonged it. Liszt was a combination of touring artist and artistic vagabond for almost a decade. Then, as throughout his later life, excepting the twelve years when he was Kapellmeister in Weimar, he was of no fixed abode, and indeed he never owned nor rented any permanent accommodation. To begin with, the travel was an intimate retreat with Marie, who was determined to develop his reading and his literary skills. It is at this time that the flow of musical journalism from Liszt’s pen begins (with some assistance from Marie, in all likelihood), and it is also the time when Liszt is finally able to marshall his creative thoughts. The plans for the Album d’un voyageur went through many permutations, and the final published version in three volumes—which is the basic text employed for the present recording—has a preface which speaks of future plans. To complicate matters further, different editions gave different titles to various parts of the work, one even employing the title ‘Années de pèlerinage’, and the early Hungarian works were intended to be a continuation of the series. But to facilitate reference, the works are now always referred to under the titles and numbering utilized here. We must beg to differ with Liszt’s typically harsh judgement of his own work; as is well known, this collection forms the basis for all but two of the later collection: Première Année de pèlerinage—Suisse and Liszt sought to suppress the earlier collection, even to the extent of buying up the original plates of some of the publications. There are many reasons why the original collection ought to be preserved, however. The pieces which correspond to the later collection have many interesting features absent in their revisions; some of the shorter works which were later passed over are absolutely delightful, and have an innocent joy which is quite a rare feature in Liszt’s secular works; at least one early masterpiece, ‘Lyon’, demands to be known, and indeed may only have been dropped because its reference is outside the Swiss border; and in any case the third part of the earlier collection turns up in a revised version as late as 1877 under the title ‘Trois Morceaux suisses’, so Liszt may have had a partial change of heart. The first part of the collection, Impressions et poésies, is by far the most important, and was deliberately designed to be so. In his rather florid preface, Liszt indicated that the subsequent parts would be filled with lighter folk material (although, at that stage, he envisaged that material as representing a great many countries) and that the poetic ideal to which he aspired was for the enjoyment of the few rather than the many. The set begins with a piece composed in 1834, inspired by a workers’ uprising in Lyon, dedicated to Liszt’s mentor, the Abbé Félicité de Lammenais, and prefaced with the workers’ slogan: ‘Vivre en travaillant ou mourir en combattant’ (‘Live working or die fighting’). Cast as a powerful, orchestral-sounding march, the work is very tightly constructed from an introductory fanfare figure and a more extended melody which share a martial dotted rhythm. The climax is particularly noteworthy for anticipating by some twenty years the sleep motif from the closing scene of Wagner’s Die Walküre. Most of the remaining music was composed in Geneva between 1835 and 1836. ‘Le Lac de Wallenstadt’ is very little different from its revised version, and similarly carries a quotation from Byron’s Childe Harold: ‘thy contrasted lake … warns me, with its stillness, to for sake / Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring.’ A rhythmic ostinato of a triplet and two duplets accompanies the most innocent of melodies. With no change of key or subject matter, ‘Au bord d’une source’ follows immediately. The poem from Schiller describes the spring as the beginning of the play of young nature. It must be admitted that this first version of one of Liszt’s loveliest water pieces contains many technical complications which were more delicately resolved in the revision. ‘Les cloches de G*****’ (why did Liszt wish to conceal the name of Geneva?—at any rate, he revealed it in the revised version) is dedicated to Liszt’s baby daughter Blandine and is an extended nature poem. In the revised version Liszt retained only a brief portion of the work and added a new second section. In this original version, the work develops its material more fully, and a subsidiary theme, discarded in the second version, rises to a passionate climax before the evening calm is restored with filigree decoration. ‘Vallée d’Obermann’ was inspired by a novel by its dedicatee Senancourt rather than by any specific Swiss scene. Although the later version is generally regarded as one of Liszt’s finest works, the original, too, is full of interest. The thematic material is broadly the same, and some of the structure is similar, but other events are distributed in a different order and several passages take on an unfamiliar harmonic hue. Liszt quotes a very lengthy piece of the novel describing the character of alpine scenery and folk music. Although this particular piece contains only original themes, many of the later pieces might be embraced by the same preface. ‘La chapelle de Guillaume Tell’ certainly contains the call of an alpenhorn, but its main theme was taken over from an unpublished and discarded ‘Grand solo caractéristique d’apropos une chansonette de Panséron’, the manuscript of which was sighted at an auction at Sotheby’s in London in 1987, but whose present whereabouts are unknown. The later version, which shares the grandeur of the first, dispenses with the horn call, but has then to do without the excellent coda which derives from it. The first book comes to a simple conclusion with ‘Psaume—de l’église à Génève’—an elaboration of a melody by Louis Bourgeois (c1510–c1561) prefaced with the opening of Psalm 42: ‘Comme un cerf brame après des eaux courantes …’ (‘As the hart panteth after the water-brooks …’). Like ‘Lyon’, this piece was excluded from the revised collection. The disarming simplicity of the nine pieces entitled Fleurs mélodiques des Alpes is often contradicted by deceptively difficult piano-writing, which may explain their almost total neglect—for there is much here that deserves a more frequent hearing. (Only two of these pieces were preserved for the Années de pèlerinage.) As so often with Liszt, there is no fine line drawn between an anonymous folk melody and a theme borrowed from a popular art song of the day, and these pieces seem all to be based on external sources, only some of which have been identified—as folk songs, horn calls and the like, and Nos 5 and 8 are based on melodies by Huber. The first group of three begins with a piece in simple ternary form, but the second is a complex kaleidoscope of melodies, later revised and combined with the second theme of the Fantaisie romantique to form Le mal du pays (Nostalgia), while the third became Pastorale in its less rhythmically daring revision. The opening number of the second group starts with a horn call and a simple melody, but the fast middle section is a mysterious march with distinctly Hungarian overtones. Then follow a piece heavily relying upon the tremolo for a rather operatic effect and another folk-song medley which for some reason contains a polonaise. The third group opens with a martial Allegretto which alternates with more fragile themes in triple time. The penultimate piece derives entirely from a horn call. The last piece is perhaps the most interesting: if some of the material is Swiss, a lot of the atmosphere is Hungarian, and some of the raw harmony brings to mind the Liszt of almost half a century later. The three paraphrases which make up the third book were actually issued separately before the collection was finally put into shape for publication at the end of the 1830s. The text followed here is that of the Liszt-Stiftung, which represents Liszt’s final thoughts (on these first versions: the 1877 revisions, Trois Morceaux suisses, will be recorded elsewhere). Except that the themes derive from Swiss art songs by forgotten minor composers—Ferdinand Huber (1791–1863) and Ernest Knop (d1850), the style and construction of the set bears comparison with some of the longer operatic fantasies. There is a certain amount of confusion over the titles of these pieces, which went through several editions, each of which made its own changes; the titles given here conform to Haslinger’s first edition of the complete Album d’un voyageur. The catalogue in Grove’s Dictionary makes a curious mish-mash of several variants, the revised versions have revised titles, and the London edition even called the pieces ‘Zürich’, ‘Berne’ and ‘Lucerne’! When the pieces were published separately as Opus 10, the titles were: ‘Improvisata sur le ranz de vaches: Départ pour les Alpes (Aufzug auf die Alp) [which should read ‘Alpen’ here and elsewhere] de Ferd Huber’; ‘Nocturne sur le “Chant montagnard” (Bergliedchen) d’Ernest Knop’; and ‘Rondeau sur le “Ranz de chèvre” (Giessreihen) de Ferd Huber’. In the ‘Ranz de vaches’, the opening fanfare becomes a melody subjected to much variation, and interspersed with two other melodies and their variants, the one in a martial 2/4, the other in a frenetic 6/8—by now a long way removed from the cattle-call of the title. ‘Un soir dans les montagnes’ is a beautifully developed song interrupted by a colossal storm, which invokes all the musical tricks of the day (especially reminiscent of the then brand new Rossini opera Guillaume Tell) before the opening music returns. Like the first paraphrase, the third submits a simple motif to great variation, and, although goats may well move faster than cattle, their call is pushed to the very extreme of musical velocity. The Fantaisie romantique dates from the same period as much of the Album d’un voyageur, and is similar in style to the Fleurs mélodiques but at a much extended length. The opening section is based on the four-note motif heard in the first bar and a plaintive cow-call after the first upward flourish. The cow-call is transformed into a pastoral Allegretto, and a second flourish leads to the first theme proper. This theme eventually recalls the four-note motif. The second theme, marked ‘La nostalgie—Mal du pays’ (which does not come from No 7b of the Fleurs mélodiques, pace Humphrey Searle) is stated in octaves with repeated chordal accompaniment. Thereafter, all the material is subjected to very free, improvisatory development, exploiting a wide range of colours. Of course this is all a bit wild and rambling, but the sheer originality of the piece quietens academic criticism. The remaining pieces are as obscure and rare as the themes upon which they are based, and Serge Gut and Michael Short are gratefully acknowledged for contributions from their research. The works were published together in 1845 and they both seem to be folk-song based. Faribolo pastour (‘Pastoral Whimsy’) is the title of a song by Jacques Jasmin (1798–1864) who wrote the dialect poem Françouneto in 1840 and may have invented the melody himself or else adapted it from a folk song. Liszt met Jasmin whilst touring at Agen in September 1844 and improvised upon Jasmin’s romance. Jasmin returned the compliment with an improvised poem which was later published with a dedication to Liszt. The Chanson du Béarn is a Béarnaise folk song ‘La haût sus las mountagnes’ (‘High up on the mountains’). On the first page of the music, the title is given as ‘Pastorale du Béarn’. (Both works were reprinted by the British Liszt Society in their 1991 Journal.) The first, a ballad with the most wistful harmonization, is treated to variations in the manner of many of Liszt’s song transcriptions, and the second is given just one variation, with an optional coda—full of tremolos and new harmony—which is much too good to be omitted. Leslie Howard © 1992 Works on This Recording 1. Album d'un voyageur, S 156 by Franz Liszt ■ Performer: Leslie Howard (Piano) ■ Period: Romantic ■ Written: 1835-1836; Geneva, Switzerland 2. Fantaisie romantique sur deux mélodies suisses, S 157 by Franz Liszt ■ Performer: Leslie Howard (Piano) ■ Period: Romantic ■ Written: 1836; Geneva, Switzerland 3. Faribolo Pastour for Piano, S 236 no 1 by Franz Liszt ■ Performer: Leslie Howard (Piano) ■ Period: Romantic ■ Written: 1844; Switzerland 4. Chanson du Béarn for Piano, S 236 no 2 by Franz Liszt ■ Performer: Leslie Howard (Piano) ■ Period: Romantic ■ Written: 1844; Switzerland