7 Songs

S'il est un charmant gazon (1859)

J’ai perdu ma force et ma vie(1872)

O Quand je dors (1859)

Vergiftet sind meine Lieder (1860)

Der du von dem Himmel bist (1860)

Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh (1859)

Die drei Zigeuner (1860)

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, both 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, for example, is a delightfully lyrical inspiration, its contrasts in harmony and rhythm discreetly integrated with the recurring, serenely melodious material of the opening bars. O quand je dors (which follows after J’ai perdu ma force et ma vie) is more self-consciously 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.

Between two rhapsodic Hugo songs, J’ai perdu ma force et ma vie makes a particularly disturbing impression. When Liszt chose to set these lines from Alfred de Musset’s Tristesse - he was in his early sixties by then and had taken minor orders to become the abbé Liszt - he was evidently going through some sort of spiritual crisis. The bleak mood of the first stanza, with its stark piano introduction and its tortured vocal line, is mitigated to some extent by the changing implications of the keyboard arpeggios in the second and sublimated by the celestial piano tremolandos in the third. As the searching but inconclusive cadences of the postulde suggest, however, despair might be stilled but is not reversed. Not that despair was unknown to Liszt in his younger years, as his brief but abruptly dramatic and painfully dissonant Heine setting, Vergiftet sind meine Lieder, vividly confirms.

Goethe’s two Wandrers Nachtlieder (Der du von dem Himmel bist and

Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh) are remarkable for their modesty in every respect - length, language, technique, thinking - except their effect, which is disproportionately profound. Liszt’s earliest efforts to set them to music are so lacking in modesty that their effect is disproportionately disappointing. The first version of Der du von dem Himmel bist is an incongruously passionate, even operatic outpouring with a very busy piano part. Alterations are made to the text and the form of the poem is distorted by numerous repetitions of certain words. A dozen or so years later he shortened his setting from 67 to 55 bars, cutting out some of the repetitions, and simplified it. The version he published in 1860 is shorter still and quite different from the other two. The piano part consists of little more than slow-moving harmonies and occasional echoes of the vocal line, which latter discreetly reflects the essential tranquillity of the poem. It is true that not only the first but also the final version of Über allen Gipfeln ist Ruh distorts the form of the poem by repetition. But even in Schubert’s setting of the same poem there are three repetitions of “Warte nur,” which is only one fewer than in the Liszt. After the perhaps over-passionate middle section, Liszt retrieves the situation at the end by recalling the quiet piano chords and the simply inflected vocal line from the beginning of the song.

While he was fluent in French, competent in German and adequate in Italian, Liszt was almost as ignorant of Hungarian as he was of English. He took pride, on the other hand, in his Hungarian nationality and cherished a particular fondness for Hungarian gypsy music. If we didn’t know that from his writings it would be clear enough from his setting of Lenau’s Die drei Zigeuner, which is more authentic in style than any of his Hungarian Rhapsodies. The cimbalom imitations in the piano introduction and interludes, the fiddle csardas in the second stanza, the use of the gypsy scale and reverse-dotted rhythms confirm not only his familiarity with the idiom but also his affection for it and what he described as “the intoxication of its fascinating exaltation.”

Gerald Larner ©2005