Kling leise, mein Lied (1848–60)

Freudvoll und leidvoll (1844–48)

S’il est un charmant gazon (1844–59)

Oh, quand je dors (1842–59)

Between 1838 and 1846 Liszt made piano transcriptions of no fewer than fifty-five Schubert songs, including the whole of Schwanengesang and much of Winterreise. Clearly - bearing in mind that he also made arrangements of songs by Beethoven, Mendelssohn and Schumann, though nothing like as many - Schubert was his favourite composer as far as the Lied was concerned. And yet his own first songs to German texts, written throughout the 1840s, are extravagantly distant from the Schubert model. It was only later, when he was thinking about issuing them in a collected edition, that he regretted his self-indulgence. “My earlier songs,” he wrote to a colleague, “are mostly inflatedly sentimental and frequently overladen in the accompaniment.”

In the light of that observation Liszt submitted just about all of his earlier songs to a thorough revision, or several revisions in a few cases, laying a musicological minefield but also perfecting some of the most beautiful of mid-nineteenth century Lieder. It is true that even in the revised version his sereande, Kling leise, mein Lied, cannot compete with Brahms’s Ständchen or Vergebliches Ständchen in terms of conciseness. When he gets to the last line of the last stanza he is still only half-way through: the second half of the song is a highly melodious review of the first stanza, which he had already developed before going on to his comparatively brief treatment of the second and third. On the other hand, the mature revision of Freudvoll und Leidvoll to words from Goethe’s Egmont – set also by Beethoven in his incidental music for the play – is a model of restraint. Liszt finds the equivalent to Clärchen’s contradictory emotions in harmonies wavering poignantly between major and minor, a freely expressive vocal line and a piano part that speaks out only once and only briefly.

If there was one literary figure among Liszt’s contemporaries comparable in his own field to the composer in his, it was Victor Hugo – a poet of equivalent virtuosity, similarly tireless creativity and, though not always for the same reason, of equal celebrity status in the world at large. Liszt go to know Hugo during the years he spent in Paris in the 1830s and was inspired by him in several ways, not least in the two symphonic poems, Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne and Mazeppa, based on his writings. The six Hugo songs, which date mainly from the early 1840s, are necessarily less sensational but, particularly in the 1859 revisions, they display a remarkable affinity of temperament between the music and the words. S’il est un charmant gazon is a delightfully lyrical inspiration, its contrasts in harmony and rhythm discreetly integrated with the recurring, serenely melodious material of the opening bars. Oh! quand je dors is more overtly artful but as a setting of a poem that is not too modest to allude to Petrarch – a literary idol for both Hugo and Liszt – it is scarcely more exaggerated in expression than is appropriate to the text.