Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude (1845)

Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude (God’s Blessing in Solitude) is one of the ten works that make up the Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses, which Liszt completed in Weimar in 1852. This tribute to the French poet Alphonse Lamartine – whose own Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses     were published in four volumes in 1830 – had occupied Liszt intermittently since 1834 when he wrote the original version of what is now the fourth piece in the series, Pensées des morts.    Although the collection as a whole is of very variable quality, Bénédiction de Dieu is by common consent one of the two most inspired parts of it, alongside the very much more turbulent      Funéraille. It was written in 1845 at Woronince in the Ukraine, on the extensive estate of the composer’s recently acquired mistress Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, whose religious devotion might well have been influential in turning his thoughts back to Lamartine and the poet’s reflections on “the impressions made by life and nature on the human soul.”   

There is no doubt that Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude is closely based on Lamartine’s poem of the same name. Apart from the fact that Liszt quotes the first few lines of the poem below the title of the piece, the lovely main theme of the work seems to have been shaped by Lamartine’s opening line D’où me vient, O mon Dieu, cette paix qui m’inonde? (Whence comes, Oh God, this peace that overwhelms me?) just as if the composer had been setting it as a song. The first third of the piece is an increasingly ecstatic development of that melody, which first enters in the left hand under gently undulating F sharp major figuration in the right and which then passes through a variety of harmonic sensations and spectacular keyboard transformations. There is a clear break before the rather less passionate middle section, an Andante based on a comparatively simple theme in D major which merges into an eloquent episode in B flat major. The reprise of the opening section is somewhat shorter than it was on its first appearance but no less fervent and it is extended by an uncharacteristically quiet contemplation of all three main themes.