Liszt: The Complete Songs, Vol. 2 - Angelika ... - Abeille Musique

eloved prevalent in Romanticism. In Liszt’s first setting
of this popular poem we hear brooding darkness and
chromatic profundity enveloping the fir tree, while the
brief idyllic dream of exotic objects of desire begins with
the repeated treble chords that often signal Lisztian
dreaming—or heavenly realms. Perhaps the most striking
difference between this first setting and its much later
revision is in the endings; this version ends by recalling the
close of Schubert’s Heine song ‘Ihr Bild’ (similar loud
dynamics, similar descending bass line, similar final major
chord). The bar of silence before the ending is another
Schubertian touch.
Vergiftet sind meine Lieder is one of Liszt’s greatest
songs. Liszt was perhaps the first composer to discover
the fifty-first poem in Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo for
song; other nineteenth-century musicians steered clear
of the Vesuvian compound of accusation, vulnerability,
helplessness, lamentation, even fear, in these words. In
one reading, Heine’s poem tells of his lifelong dilemma as
a post-Romantic poet caught between the Ideal and the
Real: the ‘Geliebte’ could be both the Romantic muse, or
the Ideal, who has poisoned his art of real life, and the
Real who poisons the Ideal. Liszt may have seen in this
poem a reflection of his disintegrating relationship
with Marie d’Agoult, which ended the same year of 1844
in which he first composed this song. His music is
organized by repetitions of the initial theme both with and
without words, a mini-rondo of obsessive grief. When
he designates ‘du’, ‘you’, as the beloved, housed in his
heart along with Medusa-like serpents, we hear one of
the most shattering dissonances in all nineteenth-century
music.
‘Clärchens Lied’, or Freudvoll und leidvoll, comes
from Act 3 of Goethe’s drama Egmont; this famous poemfor-music
had already been turned into song by Johann
Friedrich Reichardt, Friedrich Zelter, Beethoven and
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Schubert before Liszt first set it to music in 1844—a
lengthy version with a lavish introduction, which he revised
in 1849. (This revised version, heard here, was published
in 1860; Liszt also composed an entirely different setting,
which was published in 1848, the same year as the first
version of the first setting.) The title’s contrast between joy
and sorrow becomes, by musical meta morphosis, gently
swinging motion between major and minor harmonies;
the final two chords of the song are the last summation
of these two poles. The younger Liszt made ‘Himmelhoch
jauchzend’ a matter of heaven-storming richness, but the
older composer pares down the exuberance considerably.
Angelika Kirchschlager sings this version of Freudvoll und
leidvoll in the mezzo-friendly key of E major, following an
edition that circulated widely in the years following Liszt’s
death. There are some minor differences in the vocal line
and the piano-writing between this and the version in A flat
major, and the latter will follow later in the series.
The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hungarian style
known as verbunkos, born of military recruiting music
and closely associated with the virtuosity of Hun garian
gypsy bands, is on display in Die drei Zigeuner, complete
with bokázó figures (clicking of heels), hallgató (free
melodies without words), garlands of triplet rhythms, the
so-called ‘gypsy scale’, and alternating slow and lively
tempi. No wonder Liszt was drawn to this poem: its poet,
Nikolaus Lenau (born Nikolaus Franz Niembsch Edler von
Strehlenau in what was then Hungary and is now part of
Romania) created three musician-personæ whose instru -
ments—fiddle, pipes and cimbalom—Liszt mimics
brilliantly in the piano. In a letter to Carolyne on 27 May
1860, Liszt wrote: ‘In addition, the whim suddenly took
me, without rhyme or reason, to set Lenau’s Zigeuner—
and at the piano I quickly found the whole outline’; he
finished it on 17 June.
It may be a cliché to say that Goethe’s ‘Wandrers