Venezia e Napoli

Liszt never really made up his mind about Venezia e Napoli. His first work under that title, written in about 1840 and consisting of four pieces based on Venetian or Neapolitan sources, was engraved for printing but not actually published. Nineteen years later he had another look at it, revised the third and fourth pieces as Gondoliera and Tarantella respectively and added Canzone as a dramatic contrast to go between them. He then had to decide how to present this new version of Venezia e Napoli - whether to issue it among his arrangements of music by other composers, which the three pieces clearly are, or to publish it with the otherwise original works inspired by Italy in the second volume of his Années de Pèlerinage. In the end he compromised and, presumably because he felt there was so much of himself in it, joined Venezia e Napoli as a “supplement” to Années de Pèlerinage.

Gondoliera is a prophetically impressionistic piano transcription of a song identified by Liszt himself as Peruchini’s “La biondina in gondoletta.” Emerging out of a poetically harmonised Venetian mist, the barcarole melody floats charmingly by on a wealth of rippling and splashing figurations before it disappears back into the mist. The second piece is an operatic interlude based on a gondolier’s song “Nessun maggio dolore” which is carried across the water to Desdemona’s bed chamber in the third act of Rossini’s Otello. The ominous rhythms of the melody and the darkly rumbling tremolando accompaniment foretell all too clearly what kind of fate awaits Desdemona as she prepares herself for the night.

The longest and the most brilliant of the three pieces, Tarantella, is actually based on a harmless little Neapolitan song by Guillaume Louis Cottrau. You wouldn’t be aware of that from the virtuoso introduction which, after its abruptly thunderous beginning and among its evocations of the characteristic sound of the mandolin in rapid repeated notes, presents the theme not as a song but as a vigorous tarantella. Cottrau’s tune is heard in its original form only in the slower middle section, where it inspires a whole variety of keyboard effusions before it is swept away by a resumption of the dance rhythms in the accelerated coda.