3 Sonetti di Petrarca (1842–61)

Pace non trovo

Benedetto sia'l giorno

I vidi in terra

Liszt’s creative relationship with Petrarch’s sonnets began in 1838 or 1839 when he was staying in Italy with the Comtesse d’Agoult. His first inspiration was to set three of them, No.104 Pace non trovo, No.47 Benedetto sia ‘l giorno and No.123 I vidi in terra, as songs for high tenor and piano. At much the same time he reworked all three songs for piano and it was in this version that they were first published: the piano pieces were issued in 1846, the songs a year later. At some point in the next ten years or so he rewrote the piano Sonnets and allocated them to the second volume of the Années de pèlerinage. Although that was the end of the story as far as the piano pieces are concerned, Petrarch still meant enough to Liszt for him to undertake a radical revision of the three songs, in a significantly lower tessitura, in 1861.

In spite of the work that went transcription and revision over a period of twenty years, the passion that inspired the Petrarch settings in the first place is scarcely less fresh in the latest version than in the earliest. The spectacular piano introduction to Pace non trovo, with its dissonant chromatic harmonies and its agitated syncopated rhythms, is a vivid reflection of the poet’s disconcerted state of mind. The opening lines are set as dramatic recitative which melts into song only at “Tal m’ha in priggion,” first at the suggestion of the piano and then with its whole-hearted support in octaves with the voice. It is not until the last line, after a brief resumption of recitative, that the emotional paradox is resolved.

Benedetto sia'l giorno begins with a tonally uncertain piano introduction but then adopts a strummed accompaniment figure which, with the melodious Italian-style vocal line, suggests that it will be presented as a serenade. Although it finally regains its harmonic stability, however, the intervening modulations are so imaginative as to elevate the song onto a higher level of thought and musical expression.

The magical I vidi in terra – the Tristan anticipations of which were conceived long before Wagner’s opera –    is particularly well suited to the lower tessitura of the later version, not least because of the caressingly seductive melody introduced in the opening stanza. Although the vocal line veers away from it in the middle of the song, the main theme reappears in the piano part after a characteristically ethereal modulation in the third stanza to be taken up again by the voice in the last. It echoes on in the piano postlude along with memories of the Tristan sounds first heard in the introduction.

Pace non trovo

Benedetto sia'l giorno

I vidi in terra

5 Lieder

Vergiftet sind meine Lieder (1844 revised1860)

Blume und Duft (1854 revised 1860)

Ich möchte hingehn (1844 revised 1860)

Ihr Glocken von Marling (1874)

Die Loreley (1841 revised 1856)

Liszt’s creative relationship with Petrarch’s sonnets began in 1838 or 1839 when he was staying in Italy with the Comtesse d’Agoult. His first inspiration was to set three of them, No.104 Pace non trovo, No.47 Benedetto sia ‘l giorno and No.123 I vidi in terra, as songs for high tenor and piano. At much the same time he reworked all three songs for piano and it was in this version that they were first published: the piano pieces were issued in 1846, the songs a year later. At some point in the next ten years or so he rewrote the piano Sonnets and allocated them to the second volume of the Années de pèlerinage. Although that was the end of the story as far as the piano pieces are concerned, Petrarch still meant enough to Liszt for him to undertake a radical revision of the three songs, this time for baritone, in 1861.

In spite of the work that went transcription and revision over a period of twenty years, the passion that inspired the Petrarch settings in the first place is scarcely less fresh in the latest version than in the earliest. The spectacular piano introduction to Pace non trovo, with its dissonant chromatic harmonies and its agitated syncopated rhythms, is a vivid reflection of the poet’s disconcerted state of mind. The opening lines are set as dramatic recitative which melts into song only at “Tal m’ha in priggion,” first at the suggestion of the piano and then with its whole-hearted support in octaves with the voice. It is not until the last line, after a brief resumption of recitative, that the emotional paradox is resolved.

Benedetto sia'l giorno begins with a tonally uncertain piano introduction but then adopts a strummed accompaniment figure which, with the melodious Italian-style vocal line, suggests that it will be presented as a serenade. Although it finally regains its harmonic stability, however, the intervening modulations are so imaginative as to elevate the song onto a higher level of thought and musical expression.

The magical I vidi in terra – the Tristan anticipations of which were conceived long before Wagner’s opera – is particularly well suited to the lower voice required by the later version, not least because of the caressingly seductive melody introduced in the opening stanza. Although the vocal line veers away from it in the middle of the song, the main theme reappears in the piano part after a characteristically ethereal modulation in the third stanza to be taken up again by the voice in the last. It echoes on in the piano postlude along with memories of the Tristan sounds first heard in the introduction.

Most of the more than 80 songs written by Liszt between 1839 and 1883 are in German, his first language. The shortest but by no means the least remarkable is his extraordinarily embittered Heine setting, Vergifet sind meine Lieder, where the lyrical impulse is suppressed by dissonant augmented triads and a declamatory vocal line. Though fragrant in the unsettled harmonies of the first stanza and more poetic in expression, Blume und Duft is scarcely more comforting as its approaches its definitive tonality at the end. Perhaps the most inspired of Liszt’s songs from the harmonic point of view – “the testament of youth,” he called it – is the profoundly elegiac Ich möchte hingehen, where the extended suspensions lead to a clear anticipation of the Tristan chord at the end of the second line (after “versinken”) of the sixth stanza. The impressionist bell sounds echoing in the upper half of the keyboard in Ihr Glocken von Marling are well placed here to brighten the atmosphere.

There is another anticipatin of Tristan in the piano prelude to Die Loreley, the longest of Liszt’s Heine settings and one of the greatest of all his songs. Written for Marie d’Agoult, the mother of his children, with whom spent several summers on the island of Nonnenwerth in the Rhine, it is clearly a tribute to her and an attribute she shared with the Loreley, her “golden hair.” Basically, beginning at “Die Luft ist kühl” after the introductory first stanza, it is a gently flowing barcarolle drastically interrupted by the vividly scored shipwreck in the fifth stanza and resumed in a different key in the last.