5 Songs

Die Loreley (1841 revised 1856)

S’il est un charmant gazon (1844 revised 1859)

Oh! Quand je dors (1842 revised 1859)

Comment, disaient-ils (1842 revised 1859)

Enfant, si j’étais roi (1844 revised 1859)

Liszt wrote more songs to words by Heine than any other poet, including even Goethe in spite of the profound influence the older poet had on him in other respects. Die Loreley is one of the first of his Heine settings and perhaps the most interesting of all his songs, not least because of its Tristan anticipation in the piano prelude but also because of its dramatic structure and its melodic beauty. 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.

If there was one literary figure among Liszt’s contemporaries comparable in his own field to the composer in his, it was Victor Hugo – a poet of equivalent virtuosity, similarly tireless creativity and, though not always for the same reason, of equal celebrity status in the world at large. Liszt go to know Hugo during the years he spent in Paris in the 1830s and was inspired by him in several ways, not least in the two symphonic poems, Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne and Mazeppa, based on his writings. The six Hugo songs, which date mainly from the early 1840s, are necessarily less sensational but, particularly in the 1859 revisions, they display a remarkable affinity of temperament between the music and the words.

S’il est un charmant gazon is a delightfully lyrical inspiration, its contrasts in harmony and rhythm discreetly integrated with the recurring, serenely melodious material of the opening bars. Oh! quand je dors is more overtly artful but as a setting of a poem that is not too modest to allude to Petrarch – a literary idol for both Hugo and Liszt – it is scarcely more exaggerated in expression than is appropriate to the text. Taking a hint from the poet’s use of the word “alguazil” (bailiff) in the third line, Liszt sets Comment, disaient-ils as a miniature Spanish scena, colouring the piano part with simulated guitar figuration and adding a touch of flamenco decoration to the vocal line at the end. Whenever the words gave him legitimate encouragement, Liszt always liked to introduce the maximum of colour variety in his songs. Enfant, si j’étais roi, with its splendid regal gestures in the first stanza and its ominous rumblings from the underworld in the second, is an extreme but irresistibly effective example.