Gabriel Marghieri
Franz Liszt was a peerless piano and orchestral virtuoso who loved playing organs he came across on his travels. And he twice built, for his private use, a strange piano-harmonium hybrid with two or three superimposed keyboards (which can be seen at the Franz Liszt Memorial Museum in Budapest and the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna) on which he improvised or tested the pieces he was working on.
When he was not at the piano or at his desk, he was absorbed in prayer or reading, with books ranging from the Bible, Dante and Shakespeare to the latest works of his friends Heine, Balzac, Dumas, Sand and Lamartine. His artistic ambition was boundless: he wanted his music to encompass not only everything to be found in literature but in all the arts, in Man, in Nature and in Life.
It was therefore inevitable that he would develop the idea of the symphonic poem, especially since the orchestral pieces he attributed to this category were composed between 1849 and 1882 during the periods he stayed in Weimar, Goethe’s city, where he saw himself as a prophet, as the leading figure of modernity. Liszt was more or less the inventor of the symphonic poem concept in the musical genre we call “programmatic”, but he had found early signs of this in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, and Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, performed in Paris in 1830, had a huge catalysing impact on him. In addition, he must have noticed that some opera overtures which summarized the action to come, prefiguring some of the key moments ahead, were embryonic symphonic poems: Beethoven’s, Leonore II & III ; Rossini’s, William Tell (a truly symphonic poem, but which does not present any of the themes to be heard in the opera !); Verdi’s Sicilian Vespers and the Force of Destiny, etc.
Liszt intelligently understood that it is doubtless illusory, and therefore pointless, to expect music to really narrate a story which the listener would certainly be unable to follow. Moreover, there is probably little artistic interest in a composer wishing to create precise descriptions in a pleonastic relationship with words. We know that musical discourse is most convincing when it obeys its own rules. (Which is why it is no surprise for example that Richard Strauss – Liszt’s musical heir – still used classical structures in his own symphonic poems decades later!). Rather than a too literal narrative such as in Mazeppa or The Battle of the Huns, we find psychological portraits (Hamlet, Tasso), mythical tales (Orpheus, Prometheus), the portrayal of feelings and the expression of mystical thoughts (The Mountain Symphony – Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne) or philosophical ideas (The Preludes, Héroïde funèbre, The Ideals)
“It has always been supposed that so-called picturesque music aspired to compete with the paintbrush and that its aim was to paint the appearance of a forest, the angles of a mountain or the meandering of a river across a prairie. This was gratuitously absurd. It is quite obvious that objective things are not at all the business of music and that any drawing student could more easily reproduce a landscape than an accomplished musician with all the resources of the finest orchestra. But do not these same things, in so far as they affect the soul in any way, these subjective things, if I may put it that way, which have become a revery, a meditation or a surge of feeling, have a singular affinity with music? And can music translate them into its mysterious language?” (F. Liszt, Compositions for piano by M. Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt Sämtliche Schriften, vol.1, Wiesbaden, Breitkopf & Härtel, 1989)
At the time, many listeners may have been shocked by the chromatic dynamics and boldly shifting harmonies, considering these works to be dissonant, noisy and vulgarly demonstrative in their resolutely innovative language and form. As for the orchestration, it strives to be evocative in ways which have strongly evolved since Beethoven’s model: agile, brilliantly virtuoso, original and constantly reinventing itself, it gives pride of place to soloists and unusual combinations of timbres. As well as Beethoven, it is reminiscent of some Italian composers, such as Rossini – with his picturesque, colourful, sparkling and surprising style – and owes much to that other friend he admired so much: Berlioz, flamboyant and peerless.
Contrary to the general belief, it appears that the Preludes owed little to Lamartine’s eponymous poem. They were originally written as the introduction to a choral composition based on Joseph Autran’s poems Les quatre éléments: les Astres, la Terre, les Flots, les Aquilins (The Four Elements: Stars, Earth, Waves, Eagles). There are however some elements common to Lamartine’s poem and Liszt’s narrative: such are the mysteries of musical “inspiration”! As Lamartine himself asked: “What is our life if not a series of Preludes to that unknown song to which death sings the first solemn note?” The preludes evoke diverse contrasting aspects of existence which can be imagined in the succession of alternating happy, anxious, tranquil, bucolic and aggressive passages. These pieces are a good example of Liszt’s monothematic approach, in which successive themes derive from the same initial motif, generating avatars which give clear unity to works which nevertheless make great play with dialectics and contrasts.
In the same year as the Preludes (1854), Liszt wrote Tasso, Lament and Triumph as an overture to a performance of Goethe’s Torquato Tasso. He portrays the Renaissance poet as prey to solitude and passionate love, whose genius is then recognized as he attains fame. The beginning- a slow-paced, darkly introspective and lengthy elegy searching for light – is reminiscent of the first movement of the Faust Symphony with a Hungarian-flavoured clarinet melody which was to have 20th century successors with Bartók and Kodály. This is Liszt at his most magnificent! It is followed by a light, almost anecdotal episode in the Italian style (alluding to the court of the Duke of Este), before returning to high drama, followed by the triumphant and ceremonial finale. Liszt treasures and nurtures these apotheoses, underscored with clashing cymbals which we might consider naïve today but which draw their majesty and legitimacy from the fact that they are always preceded by moments of torment and doubt where the sublime is never far away.
“Lament and Triumph are the two great opposites in the destiny of poets, of whom it is rightly said that if malediction often weighs down on their lives, benediction is always present at their graves”
(F. Liszt, Programme for Tasso, Lament and Triumph).
I believe it is therefore right to identify the precursors of symphonic poems in the overtures to past operas. Orpheus (also from 1854) is still, as so often in this corpus, designed as the introduction to the performance of a work by somebody else: in this case no less than the tragedy by Gluck. And Liszt proposed to contrast “those barbaric times…with the serenely civilizing character of the songs emanating from all works of art, their suave energy, their august authority, their sonorities, majestic and voluptuous to the soul, their undulations as gentle as the breezes in the Elysian Fields.” The orchestra, with the rich sounds of its harps, should of course be heard as the suave and resonant descendent of the hero’s lyre.
Transcription is not always treason. Liszt, whatever we may think, would not be so ungracious as to be offended at the treatments others have given to his works, such as those proposed here. He himself had regular recourse to paraphrase and transcription, whether for his own works or those of others. Transposing the colours of Beethoven’s symphonies and a variety of other works (fashionable operas, Schubert’s Lieder and so on) to his ten fingers and the black and white keys of the piano, he can even be considered as the most insatiable, ingenious, inspired and famous transcriber of all.
Why did he transcribe? To be seen as a brilliant concert performer, perhaps; to contribute to a wider dissemination of these works at a time when phonographs and records did not yet exist; and, at a deeper level, to make them his own, because he loved them.
But there is more. Not content either to transcribe or to orchestrate a posteriori his own music, Liszt the composer is open to all possibilities for a work still in development; he can give the impression that he doesn’t know to which instrument it will finally be dedicated. Look at the noticeably different transcriptions for organ or piano of Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen (Weeping, Lamenting, Worrying, Fearing) or B.A.C.H. This “artistic licence” of course gives legitimacy to a large variety of adaptations and perhaps encourages us to take too many liberties with this composer.
Liszt, who invented the piano recital (where a single performer takes up the whole evening and can therefore transcribe and paraphrase), may also be the inventor of the organ recital; for the “Pope of instruments” (in his own words) his imagination produced works, almost all of which are religious in inspiration but not destined for liturgy. With the transcription for the organ of non-religious works, the secularisation of the instrument was under way. It was in Liszt’s century that organs began to be built in large concert halls, especially in England (Birmingham, Liverpool, London, Sheffield) but also in Amsterdam and at the Trocadéro in Paris.
How can an orchestra be compressed into an organ? This requires experimentation and ingenuity, finding equivalents to large ensembles, to the pizzicato of the strings, to the woodwind section, to each solo woodwind instrument, to the brass fanfares. It means finding ways of conveying the rapid melodic exchanges between different groups of instruments, being bold enough to rewrite a passage so that it sounds better, daring to do away with some notes to make the texture clearer or quite simply possible to play with only two hands and feet. Some things will be a challenge, such as a harp solo. Some, like a chorus of flutes, will come easily. And the percussion will just have to disappear. You will have to know how far to go and decide what is permissible and what is not. What will demonstrate respect and what will be a transgression. A good transcriber is not unlike a philosopher, who meditates on liberty and responsibility.
So what, in the end, is the justification for transcribing? It makes it possible to hear the work differently, to “see” it in a different light; it helps us know the work better, or simply to rediscover it since we are confronted with the challenging tasks of reassessing timbres and volumes. We should not therefore lament over what we are briefly losing because we have been deprived of the original. We should not compare the respective merits of keyboard instruments and an orchestra, but remember that Liszt himself transcribed for two pianos his thirteen symphonic poems. Finally, let us just emphasize everything the organ brings in comparison to the piano.: timbres, dynamism, the prolonged resonances of the notes, and the different divisions of the instrument.
The organist, as a solo virtuoso, must be in charge of a vast range of moods : delicate poetic mysteries, emphatic generosity, electrifying energy, epic grandeur, countless torments, majestic or savage drama, fervour, passionate song and constant exaltation. For that, an instrument is needed which can make it all possible. The organ built by E.F. Walcker & Cie in Riga Cathedral perfectly meets these requirements. For its inauguration, Liszt, three years before his death, wrote Nun danket alle Gott (Now thank we all our God); a gigantic work with a broad range of authentic, diversified timbres of the highest quality delivered in perfect acoustic clarity. “Nobody can be expected to do the impossible. Nobody has yet been able to play an orchestral work on the piano: however, we must continue to aspire to that ideal by exploring the rough and imperfect forms available. It seems to me that is all life and art are good for.” (F. Liszt to Camille Saint-Saëns, 2 octobre 1876 [Jousse-Gérard, p. 396])
Laisser un commentaire