Les Jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este

Les Jeux d’Eau à la Villa d’Este is prophetic in at least two senses. Com­posed in 1877 (and published in the third volume of the Années de Pélerinage), its impressionistic piano writing anticipates other famous watery pieces like Ravel’s Jeux d’Eaux or Debussy’s Reflets dans l’Eau by a quarter of a century.The difference is that the Abbé Liszt, as he by then was, found inspiration not only in what he could see and hear in the surging and bubbling jets of water in a famous garden of fountains but also by the religious symbolism he perceives behind them: at the long-awaited point where the main melody enters the right hand, the score offers a quotation from St John: “The water that I shall give him shall be in a well of water springing up into everlasting life.”