Three Petrarch Sonnets (from Années de pèlerinage)

No.47 in D flat major: Benedetto sia ‘l giorno…

No.104 in E major: Pace non trovo…

No.123 in A flat major: I’ vidi in terra…

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 (though not in that order), 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, where they found an appropriate place alongside other works with a literary or artistic inspiration written in Italy in 1838-9. 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.

Preserving much of the freshness of the amorous inspiration of the original song settings (which might well have been Liszt’s first works of that kind, incidentally) all three of the piano Sonnets are rhapsodic inventions with an abundance of keyboard decoration: they are not so much transcriptions of the songs as contemplations on them – or “nocturnes” as Liszt himself described them.

The vocal origin of Sonnet No.47 is particularly apparent in the first piano version which, though pianistically more ornate than that published in Années de pèlerinage, makes a point of projecting the melodic line in a straightforward 4/4 time, much as it appears in the first stanza of the song. In the later version, after a short but impassioned introduction, Liszt changes the metre to 6/4 and places each note of the intimately expressive melody off the beat – which, sophisticated device though it is, has the effect of making the sentiments which inspired it seem all the more spontaneous. There is a change of theme to a more sustained left-hand melody towards the end but the song and the piano piece agree in recalling the theme of the first stanza in the closing bars.

In Sonnet No.104 the first stanza of the Petrarch original is particularly remarkable for its agitated state of mind, which is duly reflected in the 1839 piano version. In the version published in Années de pèlerinage he retains the short, anxiously syncopated introduction to the song but then cuts the dramatic recitative in the first stanza to proceed straight to the melodious main theme that enters with the second stanza. The disappearance of that melody, on the other hand, to make way for another towards the end, reflects the change of mood in the last stanza of the song.

Sonnet No.123 begins with something like the introduction to the song with its distant anticipations of the second act of Tristan und Isolde. From the entry of the first vocal melody, recognisable by its expressively lyrical line and the arpeggiated accompaniment, the piano piece follows the construction of the song up to the ethereally coloured modulation that introduces the third stanza and the poet’s direct address to Love. But then the pianist in Liszt takes over for an exquisitely delicate cadenza. The pianist and the song composer agree on the waywardly lingering harmonies of the postlude, which is much the same in the two versions.