from Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses

1 Invocation (1847-52)

2 Ave maria (1846-1852

4 Pensée des morts (1834-52)

“These lines are addressed to an only small number,” wrote Alphonse de Lamartine in the foreword to his Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses. Liszt was clearly one of that small number, one of “those meditative souls who are irresistibly elevated by solitude and contemplation towards infinite ideas, towards religion… whose whole existence is a silent hymn to the Divinity and to hope…” His immediate reaction to the Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses was an extraordinary piano piece which he dedicated to Lamartine in 1834, giving it the poet’s title and introducing it with his foreword. But that was only the beginning. A year later he announced his intention to undertake a whole series of such pieces, although it was not until 1847 that he seriously got to work on the project and not until 1852 that he completed it.

Invocation - which is prefaced by fourteen limes from Lamartine beginning “Arise, voice of my soul, with the dawn, with the rain” - is the poet’s “silent hymn to the Divinity” made sonorous in Liszt’s grand manner. Between the outer sections of fervent melodic proclamations, massive handfuls of repeated chords and crashing double octaves there is, however, an episode of quietly solitary contemplation with a confession of harmonic uncertainty. Ave Maria, a reworking in piano terms of a piece for chorus and organ written in 1846, has nothing to do with Lamartine. On the other hand, with its mixture of sweetly harmonised prayer and its echoes of gregorian chant, it does find a natural place between Invocation and the next piece in the complete set Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude.

The original Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses, the single piece written in 1834, Liszt later found “too cut up and faulty.” Certainly, when he so thoroughly revised it under the title Pensée des morts as the fourth piece in the set he made something rather more coherent of it. If at the same time he deprived it of its daringly “faulty” harmonies, by incorporating within it the main theme of an unfinished De Profundis for piano and orchestra he gave it a centre of enormous gravity without limiting the extent of its mystic speculations.