Années de Pèlerinage – 2me Année: Italie S161 (1838-1849)

Sposalizio

Il Penseroso

Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa

3 Sonetti di Petrarca:

      Sonetto 47: Benedetto sia‘l giorno…

      Sonetto 104: Pace non trovo…

      Sonetto 123: I’ vidi in terra…

Après une lecture du Dante – Fantasia quasi sonata

The inspiration Liszt found in Italy while he and Marie d’Agoult were there in 1838–39 was rather different from that which he had experienced in Switzerland during their tour of the lakes and mountains in 1835-36. The Swiss volume of the Années de Pèlerinage is concerned mainly with the landscape and other impressive natural phenomena. In Italy it was the artistic treasures of that country that stimulated his imagination. As he wrote in an open letter to Berlioz in 1839, “The beautiful, in this privileged country, appeared to me in the purest and most sublime forms. The art showed itself to me in all its splendour; it revealed itself to me in its universality and in its unity. The feeling and the thought penetrated me more each day concerning the hidden relationship which unites works of genius. Raphael and Michelangelo helped me better to understand Mozart and Beethoven.”

At much the same time as Liszt was writing that letter he was at work on Sposalizio (Betrothal) under the inspiration of Raphael’s painting of the wedding of Joseph and Mary in the Brera in Milan.    Whatever it was in Raphael that moved him to venture into such bold harmonies in the piece, it is clear that its construction is closely related to the painting. There are two main themes: the first appears unaccompanied in the left hand in the opening bars and is subsequently transformed and developed in a variety of melodic shapes; the second is a sort of chorale introduced ppp and dolcissimo in a slower tempo. The two themes mingle, quietly at first, then serenely as the right hand carries the chorale over arpeggios derived from the opening theme. Moving towards the climax, the two themes are combined most emphatically with the chorale in the right hand and the arpeggios now expressed in thunderous left-hand octaves. The ending, which is approached by delicate right-hand figuration clearly anticipatory of Debussy’s E major Arabesque, is as quiet as the beginning.

Before Liszt published the Italian volume of the Années de Pèlerinage he commissioned a painter to sketch not only the Raphael Sposalizio    but also Michelangelo’s monumental sculpture Il Penseroso (The Thinker) at the tomb of Lorenzo de Medici in Florence so that both works of art could be illustrated in the score. He further illuminated Il Penseroso with a quotation from Michelangelo: “I am thankful to sleep and more thankful to be made of stone. So long as injustice and shame remain on the earth I count it a blessing not to see or to feel; so do not wake me – speak softly.” Both the medium, in the stony augmented harmonies, and the message, in the sternly funereal rhythms, are clearly heard. While Liszt doesn’t always speak softly, he imposes an uncharacteristic restraint on the dynamics even so.

Salvator Rosa is celebrated here not for his painting but for a song, Vado ben spesso, which, though long attributed to him, was actually written by Giovanni Bononcini. The misunderstanding is unfortunate but far from disastrous: if any work requires a cheerful march at this stage it is the italian volume of the Années de Pèlerinage.

Liszt’s first inspiration on discovering Petrarch’s sonnets was to set three of them 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, where they found an appropriate place alongside the other works with a literary or artistic inspiration. Preserving much of the freshness of the amorous inspiration of the original song settings, all three of the piano Sonnets are rhapsodic inventions with an abundance of keyboard decoration. They are not so much transcriptions of the songs as contemplations on them – or “nocturnes” as Liszt himself described them.

The vocal origin of Sonnet No.47 is particularly apparent in the first piano version which, though pianistically more ornate than that published in Années de pèlerinage, makes a point of projecting the melodic line in a straightforward 4/4 time, much as it appears in the first stanza of the song. In the present version, after a short but impassioned introduction, Liszt changes the metre to 6/4 and places each note of the intimately expressive melody off the beat – which, sophisticated device though it is, has the effect of making the sentiments which inspired it seem all the more spontaneous. There is a change of theme to a more sustained left-hand melody towards the end but the song and the piano piece agree in recalling the theme of the first stanza in the closing bars.           

In Sonnet No.104 the first stanza of the Petrarch original is particularly remarkable for its agitated state of mind, which is duly reflected in the 1839 piano version. In the version published in Années de pèlerinage he retains the short, anxiously syncopated introduction to the song but then cuts a dramatic recitative to proceed straight to the melodious main theme that enters with the second stanza. The disappearance of that melody, on the other hand, to make way for another towards the end, reflects the change of mood in the last stanza of the song.

Sonnet No.123 begins with something like the introduction to the song with its distant anticipations of the second act of Tristan und Isolde. From the entry of the first vocal melody, recognisable by its expressively lyrical line and the arpeggiated accompaniment, the piano piece follows the construction of the song up to the ethereally coloured modulation that introduces the third stanza and the poet’s direct address to Love. But then the pianist in Liszt takes over for an exquisitely delicate cadenza. The pianist and the song composer agree on the waywardly lingering harmonies of the postlude, which is much the same in the two versions.

The full title of Liszt’s Dante Sonata – which was first written in 1837 and revised to take its place in the Années de Pèlerinage in 1849 – is a clear indication that the work owes much to the poem Après un Lecture de Dante in Victor Hugo’s Les Voix Intérieures. Like the poem, the sonata is a reflection on Dante in general rather than a detailed description of a particular episode, although it is obviously closer to Inferno than Paradiso.

According to Hugo, “When the poet depicts hell he depicts life, a shadow in flight, pursued by spectres.” The idea of pursuit is strangely, even obsessively present in the Dante Sonata. It is present for example in the impressively lugubrious series of tritones – “Abandon hope all ye who enter here” – with which the work opens. In fact, the two-note persecution motif, the rhythmically stronger note following hard on the weaker, is scarcely ever absent. The Presto agitato assai first subject, desperately spiralling from D minor to F sharp minor, is based on it. Apart from the appearance of a rising and falling triplet figure, also from the introduction, there is no respite until the diabolic tritones are purged and emerge as perfect fifths. This encourages a change to the major and the birth of a heroic chorale-like theme, glorified by precipitous double octaves.

Actually, this second subject is derived from the first by a characteristic process of thematic transformation, which is the most significant anticipation in the Dante Sonata of the great Sonata in B minor. One could also claim the first part of the development section as a slow-movement equivalent, and perhaps as a reference to Hugo’s lines alluding to the story of Francesca da Rimini:    “Love, an embracing couple, sad and ardent still, passing in a whirlwind, a wound in their sides.” The tritones are restored, however, and the rest of the development is a drastic, persecuted effort to exorcise them – in which the second-subject hero is eventually successful. So the recapitulation (in D major) is concerned mainly with the glorification of the heroic and reserves the recall of the first subject for a Presto coda.