PIANO MUSIC - Abeille Musique

T
HE HISTORY of Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et
religieuses is long and complex: the eventual series
of ten works was published by Kistner in 1853,
having been finally revised and prepared by the end of
1851. Many of the pieces in that collection started life
somewhat earlier. This present recording completes the
picture begun with volume 7 of this series (‘Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses and other pieces inspired by
sacred texts’) where all of the other related works appear.
The works may be divided into three groups: the early
pieces; the 1847 series; and the 1851 series.
The earliest pieces were never grouped together as
they stood, although all of them were at some stage
expected to form part of a collection: the single piece
Harmonies poétiques et religieuses of 1834 (recorded
in volume 7) was the starting-point. By 1841, Liszt wrote
of several pieces sketched at Fontainebleau towards the
end of 1840. In fact only one, Prière d’un enfant à son
réveil (to give it the title as in Liszt’s correspondence –
the manuscript is untitled), survives from this period.
In 1844, and again in 1846, Liszt sketched a piano solo
on the De profundis, a chant which he had already
employed in his grand De profundis – Psaume
instrumental for piano and orchestra of 1835, and to
which he would return later in an early version of
Totentanz. In 1845 Liszt composed a piano piece
apparently intended to inaugurate a cycle. The manuscript
itself bears only the generic title Harmonies poétiques
et religieuses, with a bracketed alternative Préludes et
Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. There is also in
Weimar an 1846 manuscript, although not in Liszt’s
hand, of a four-part setting of a verse of the Miserere,
erroneously attributing the music to Palestrina (as Liszt
was to do in his piano piece in the 1851 collection).
Litanies de Marie was composed probably in 1846 but
certainly by early the following year.
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The second group of pieces was all completely worked
out in Sketchbook N9, over a period from October 1847 to
early January 1848, during which time Liszt was staying
with the Princess zu Sayn-Wittgenstein at her Polish estate,
Woronince. At some point that book was mutilated,
probably by Liszt himself – it is clear that he used it as the
basis for the later version of all the similar material in the
final published collection. Further, a previous archivist in
Weimar replaced some torn-out pages (all from La lampe
du temple) in haphazard order, and, not noticing that a
further page had been removed after Litanies de Marie
(leaving only the last bar of Miserere, and none of the
Pater noster), numbered the pages in the sketchbook
continuously. One of the pieces looks like unconnected
sketches until one realizes that it needs to be used to
replace two sections in the otherwise complete and published
1834 piece Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. It
is necessary to restore the double-sided sheet which is now
in Paris, correct the order of the leaves in La lampe du
temple, collate the insertions with the published piece,
identify carefully throughout the collection which passage
Liszt has decided upon in the places where he offers
apparently unresolved choices, to decipher various
passages in shorthand notation, and, exceptionally, to
complete the final bars of the penultimate number. Liszt’s
unequivocal ‘Laus Deo’ at the end of the last number
signifies that he, at least, thought that the collection was
complete and finished. Unfortunately, the editors of the
Neue Liszt-Ausgabe did not get to the bottom of these
mysteries at the time when their volume I/IX was
published, and they chose to publish only those pieces
from the beginning of the sketchbook which present no
problems: Élevez-vous, voix de mon âme (Invocation,
first version), Hymne de la nuit and Hymne du matin.
(These pieces are recorded in volume 7.) Then follows
Litanies de Marie (second version) which has often been