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

and its spare texture, devoid of pyrotechnics. The Bavarian
poet Oscar von Redwitz-Schmölz became famous in his
twenties for his sentimental epic Amaranth from which
the Princess Augusta of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach (later
Queen of Prussia and German Empress) extracted two
stanzas in July 1852 for Liszt to set to music. Fifteen years
later, in 1867, Liszt met Redwitz-Schmölz and wrote to
Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein (1819–1887, the most
important woman in Liszt’s life from the time of their
meeting in 1847 to his death) to say: ‘His person pleases
me more than I would have expected. One generally
imagines him wholly steeped in piety—with lowered eyes
and a timid manner of speaking, intermingled with sighs!
Not he!’ The penultimate harmony on ‘sagen’ is a final
touch of chromatic expressivity in this small gem.
La perla was probably composed in homage to
the noblewoman who wrote the poem: Thérèse von
Hohenlohe-Waldenburg (1817–1895), who was a cousin
of Princess Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein (the daughter
of Liszt’s mistress Carolyne by her estranged Russian
husband) and the mother of Rilke’s later patroness
7
Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis. Thérèse and Liszt
had encountered one another in Rome, and Liszt visited
the Hohenlohe villa in Duino in 1867–8. In this poem she
endows a pearl with a persona and a history, from its birth
in a mussel shell to its brutal removal from its oceanic
home and its subsequent slavery in adornment for the
rich: the rape of Nature to satisfy human vanity. In the
postlude of this extended dramatic song we hear a griefstricken,
chromatic transformation of the placid sea-music
at the start.
At the end of this recording, we hear what happened
when Liszt revisited an earlier, more extravagant setting of
Goethe’s Der du von dem Himmel bist. In this reconceptualization
later in life, what was extroverted earlier
becomes a more inward experience. In the change of a
single chord when the initial three harmonies of the
introduction are repeated, we hear the proximity of
‘Schmerz’ and ‘Lust’, their kinship and their difference. We
also hear Liszt’s occasional recourse to basso cantante, a
‘singing bass line’; both the piano and the singer pray for
peace.
SUSAN YOUENS © 2012
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