Le mal du pays

(Années de Pèlerinage, Première Année, Suisse, No.8)

According to Jean-Jaques Rousseau in his Dictionnaire de Musique, the ranz des vaches - a traditional kind of melody played on the alphorn to summon cows from distant Alpine meadows - once had such a powerfully nostalgic effect on Swiss soldiers away from home that they would “burst into tears, desert or die” if they heard it. Although Rousseau, writing in the middle of the eighteenth century, seems to have thought that there was only one ranz des vaches, his respect for its emotional potential is no less interesting for that.

It was clearly with some such romantic notion in mind that Liszt rewrote an earlier study of an alphorn melody which he then published under the title Le mal du pays (“Homesickness”) in the Swiss volume of his Années de Pèlerinage in 1855. The first version of that piece -published without a title in 1840 and then again in 1842 as the second of the Fleurs mélodiques des Alpes in Album d’un voyageur - treats the ranz des vaches melody in much the same way except that it has nothing of the overtly “homesick” element which is added in Le mal du pays. There is nothing about homesickness either in the lengthy quotation from Sénancour’s Obermann which prefaces Le mal du pays in the score of Années de Pèlerinage and which was as influential as Byron’s Childe Harold in colouring Liszt’s view of Switzerland in the months he spent there with Marie d’Agoult in 1835 and 1836.

However, in describing the evocative quality of the ranz des vaches - “its first sounds place us in the high valleys, near to bare red-grey rocks, under the cold sky, under the burning sun” - Sénancour does refer to Rousseau. Perhaps that is what got Liszt thinking about the reputation of the ranz des vaches for inducing acute homesickness. Certainly, having presented his traditional alphorn melody in its modal E minor, he introduces a grieving G-sharp-minor Adagio dolente which is no less heavily nostalgic when it modulates to B major. The second half of the piece repeats the first half a minor third higher and then adds a passionate extension to the Adagio dolente before recalling the ranz des vaches under dark E minor skies in the closing bars.

Gerald Larner©