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It was with a series of
initially nine symphonic poems
(a series culminating with Hungaria
as a programmatical declaration
of the composer's nationalist
sympathies) that Franz Liszt
approached the medium of the
large-scale symphonic work.
Until then his forays into the
field of composition had been
limited to his own instrument,
the piano. All nine numbers, he
announced in 1856, admittedly
rather understating his case,
were intended to serve “only as
prolegomena to the Faust
and Dante Symphonies”,
in other words, as preliminary
exercises for his two great
choral symphonies, both of which
were premiered in 1857. Liszt
had first begun to explore the
genre of the symphonic poem (as
he was finally to call these
works) soon after taking up his
prestigious and highly
responsible appointment as
Kapellmeister to the Weimar
court of the Duke of
Saxe-Weimar. In all these works
his aim was to express a “poetic
idea” that would either be
worked out in the form of a
programme or merely hinted at by
means of a title. In Liszt’s
view, such programme music was
by no means lacking in
sophistication, its purpose
being “to reveal the musical
content in its most intimate
union with the idea that is to
be expressed”.
In the symphonic poem Mazeppa
of 1851 the various stages in
the musical argument clearly
reflect the course of its
underlying narrative, which is
based on the story of Ivan
Mazeppa as retold by both Byron
and Victor Hugo. (Liszt had got
to know both poems during his
early years in Paris and even
included the whole of Hugo’s
poem from his 1829 cycle Les
Orientales - at the head
of his full score of the work.)
As a barbaric punishment for an
illicit liaison, Mazeppa, an
aristocrat serving at the Polish
court, is tied to a wild horse
that is driven across the
steppes as far as the Ukraine,
where Cossacks rescue the
half-dead youth and finally
appoint him their leader, the
victorious “lord of the
Ukraine”. With what sounds like
the crack of a whip, the
turbulent action and, with it,
the wild ride begins, not
reaching its exhausted
conclusion until some 400 bars
later, when a trumpet call
proclaims Mazeppa’s rescue and a
triumphal Allegro marziale
reflects the happy outcome. Mazeppa
began musical life as a piano
study that went through four
revisions between 1826 and 1851,
each one longer, more difficult
and, at the same time, more
expressive than its predecessor.
(The third and fourth versions
of this study are both called Mazeppa.
The fourth is the best known of
all and is familiar from the
final version of the Etudes
d'execution tmnscendante
of 1851.)
Les Préludes is
one of those not infrequent
cases of “programme music” in
which the “programme” is added
to a piece that is already
finished - strictly speaking, a
contradiction in terms, but
entirely plausible from an
artistic point of view (one need
think only of the many titles
added to modern paintings after
they have already been
completed), for what matters
here is the expressive power and
character of the music and its
association with poetry and
literature, not its ability to
retell a story in music. The
present piece was originally
intended as the overture to a
four-movement choral work, Les
Quatres Eléments (1848),
but Liszt subsequently abandoned
this project and, instead,
repeatedly revised the overture,
making it motivically
independent of the choral
movements and finally publishing
it as a symphonic poem under the
title Les Préludes. This
is also the title of a long ode
by Alphonse de Lamartine, a poet
whom Liszt had held in the
highest regard since his
adolescent years in Paris and to
whom he paid additional tribute
in his great piano cycle Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses
of 1845-52. Liszt could not, of
course, assume that German
audiences would be familiar with
Lamartine’s poem, and so he
prefaced his own piece with a
free translation of the poem,
describing how all the
“preludes” of which our lives
are made up - the workings of
fate and our emotional responses
to it - ultimately culminate in
“that unknown song whose first
and solemn note is sounded by
death”. The wealth of musical
material and the enormous
thematic and emotional variety
of Les Préludes can
again be enjoyed today, now that
memories of the work’s misuse as
Nazi propaganda have faded.
In spite of the dynamic
climaxes towards its end, Orpheus
strikes a unified note in terms
of its mood and musical
development, with no pronounced
contrasts but only a sense of
gentle melodiousness, a worthy
hymn to Orpheus, the mythical
creator of music, whose
traditional instrument - the
lyre - is represented by harps
that are especially prominent at
the start of the piece. “Today,
as in the past and as always,”
Liszt wrote in his preface,
summing up the aesthetic aim of
a piece originally written to
launch a performance of Gluck’s
Orfeo ed Euridice in
Weimar in 1854, “it is Orpheus,
it is art, that pours forth its
waves of melody and its mighty
chords like a gentle,
irresistible light over the
resisting elements that wage
bloody war within the soul of
each individual and at the heart
of every society.”
The second of Liszt’s
Hungarian Rhapsodies (the
original piano version of which
dates from 1847) has rightly
become famous as arguably the
most quintessential example of
the composer’s popular
“Hungarian” style. Together with
five other Rhapsodies (nos. 5,
6, 9, 12 and 14), it was later
orchestrated by Franz Doppler.
(Doppler was born in Lemberg
and, after working in Vienna,
moved to Pest, where he made a
name for himself in the 1840s as
a flautist and opera composer
and where he and his brother
Karl built up the Hungarian
Philharmonic Orchestra. He met
Liszt in Weimar in 1854 in the
course of a concert tour.)
Doppler’s brilliant
orchestration adds to the
overall effectiveness of this
bravura rhapsody, with the
emotional pathos of its lassù
introduction well matched by the
irresistible élan of its
tempestuous concluding friss.
Franz
Ledermann
(Translation:
Stewart Spencer)
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