J’ai perdu ma force (1872)

Go not Happy Day (1879)

Sonetto di Petrarca: I vidi in terra (1838-61)

Die drei Zigeuner (1860)

Isten veled! (1846)

When Liszt chose to set Alfred de Musset’s Tristesse (J’ai perdu ma force) in 1872 - the abbé Liszt as he was by then - he was evidently going through some sort of spiritual crisis. The bleak mood of 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. It is offset here by the fresh lyricism of Go not, happy day, which was a response not so much to a personal experience as to an invitation to contribute to a Tennyson anthology in 1879. Liszt’s one English setting, it seems to have more than a hint of the Victorian drawing room about it - even though it is difficult to imagine any British composer of the period risking such a discreet ending.

Liszt’s creative relationship with Petrarch’s sonnets began in 1838 or 1839 when he was staying in Italy with the Comtesse d’Agoult. His first inspiration was to set three of them, No.47 Benedetto sia ‘l giorno, No.104 Pace non trovo and No.123 I vidi in terra, 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. Although that was the end of the story as far as the piano pieces are concerned, Petrarch still meant enough to Liszt for him to undertake a radical revision of the three songs, this time for baritone, in 1865.

The magical Sonetto No.123 I vidi in terra - the Tristanesque harmonies of which were conceived long before Wagner’s opera - is particularly well suited to the lower voice, not least because of the caressingly seductive melody introduced in the opening stanza. Although the vocal line veers away from it in the middle of the song, the main theme reappears in the piano part after a characteristically ethereal modulation in the third stanza to be taken up again by the voice in the last. It echoes on in the piano postlude along with memories of the Tristanesque harmonies first heard in the introduction.

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.”

In spite of his problems with the language - his attempts to learn it were quickly abandoned - Liszt did write three songs in Hungarian between 1846 and 1883. The first of them, Isten veled, a setting of a Horvath poem on a lover’s leave-taking, is more discreet in its Hungarianisms than the Die drei Zigeuner showpiece but, even if the cimabalom imitations in the piano part are less colourful and the rhythmic snap less exuberant, their ethnic origin is still unmistakable.