3 Lieder aus Schillers Wilhelm Tell (1845–59)

Der Fischerknabe –

Der Hirt –

Der Alpenjäger

Liszt’s love of Switzerland and his admiration for its national hero first found their joint expression in 1836 in his collection of piano pieces, Album d’un Voyageur, which includes a solemn evocation of    William Tell’s Chapel on the edge of Lake Uri. As is indicated by the quotation from Wilhelm Tell, “One for all, all for one,” printed at the head of La Chapelle de Guilaume Tell (which was later incorporated in the Swiss volume of Années de Pèlerinage), Liszt was familiar with Schiller’s play even then. Although Tell makes no appearance in the three Lieder from Wilhelm Tell, they are a vivid reflection of Liszt’s reaction to the atmosphere of the play – particularly in the first version, which was written as a cycle with tonal and thematic links between songs intended to be performed without a break.

The cyclical nature of the three Wilhelm Tell Lieder is less clear in the revised version, which Liszt undertook 14 years later in preparation for a complete edition of his songs to be published in 1860. By then he had come to the conclusion that, as he told a colleague, “My earlier songs are mostly inflatedly sentimental and frequently overladen in the accompaniment.” Even so, although the 1859 revised version of Der Fischerknabe cannot be described as a “piano concerto with vocal obbligato” as the 1845 original was, the piano part is still far more elaborate than anything Schubert might have written. While retaining the impressionistic water symbolism in the rippling arpeggios in the left hand and the gently splashing harmonies in the right, however, it secures an eerily dramatic effect by all but silencing the piano for the entry of the seductive call “from the deep.”

One feature which remained unchanged in the revision of Der Hirt is the curiously Hungarian-sounding figuration of the introduction, even though other colour effects in the original piano part, like the shpherd’s recurring horn calls, are omitted. As in Der Fischerknabe, the vocal line is simplified too but not as much as that of    Der Alpenjäger. The stormy last song is so drastically abbreviated, in fact, that there is no room for the quiet coda which, in the original version, alludes to the opening bars of the cycle.