St Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds from Two Legends for piano

He lifted up his eyes and saw the trees which stood by the wayside filled with a countless multitude of birds; at which he marvelled, and said to his companions: “Wait a little for me in the road and I will go and preach to my little brothers the birds.” And he went into the field and began to preach to the birds that were on the ground; and forthwith those which were in the trees came round him, and not one moved during the whole sermon; nor would they fly away until the Saint had given them his blessing.

As far as anyone knows, Liszt never made field studies of birdsong, notating it and transcribing it for piano as Olivier Messiaen was to do. He was aware of the problems involved, however, as he indicated in his preface to the score of St Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds by confessing to his “lack of ingenuity” and regretting that the piano is “so lacking in variety of accent and tone colour.” But Liszt’s piano writing is never lacking in colour, least of all in this work, which is quite extraordinary in the way it anticipates Messiaen not only in some aspects of his piano realisations of birdsong but also in his expression of religious sentiment. Certainly, it is so precisely evocative of every detail of the famously picturesque episode in Chapter 16 of The Little Flowers of Saint Francis that one scarcely needs to refer to it to keep up with the musical narrative.

St Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds is the first of Two Legends written in 1863, the other being the equally eloquent St Francis of Paolo Walking on the Waters.