Consolations (1849-50)

Andante con moto

Un poco più mosso

Lento placido

Quasi adagio

Andantino

Allegretto sempre cantabile

According to ironic speculation, these six short and relatively easy pieces were intended as “consolations” for pianists without the technique to cope with Liszt in more characteristic, virtuoso mode. It’s a nice idea but the fact is that the title of the collection, if not the music itself, was inspired by Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve’s Les Consolations, a volume of twenty-nine poems dedicated to Victor Hugo and published in Paris in 1830. There is, however, another dimension to the work: at the time he was writing the Consolations Liszt was also involved with his biography of Chopin, who had died earlier in 1849 and was clearly very much on his mind. If the unadorned poetry of the Andante con moto in E major has more in common with Mendelssohn’s Songs Without Words than anything by Chopin and if the intimately expressive melodic line of the second piece in the same key calls Schumann to mind, the Lento placido is surely a tribute to Chopin’s Nocturne Op.27 No.2, with which it shares more than the key of D flat major.

For Liszt admirers who find the hymn-like melodic material of the Quasi adagio (also in D flat major) uncharacteristically bordering on the banal the consolation is that the theme was given to the composer by the Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna, who funded his appointment as Kapellmeister at Weimar out of her own pocket. Besides, whatever he could do harmonically, rhythmically and colouristically to add to the melodic interest he masterfully did. Written four or five years earlier, when it bore the title of “Madrigal,” the Andantino in E major no doubt owes its presence here to its echoes of Chopin, including instances of the characteristic mazurka rhythm from time to time. The idea that Liszt intended the Consolations to be performed as a set - as the Un poco più mosso tempo direction of the second piece inescapably suggests - is confirmed by the Allegretto sempre cantabile which is not only the most passionately developed of them but also the only one with a cadenza. A short epilogue ends the collection in the E major in which it began.