Concert programme — Brahms, Liszt & Schubert

Johannes Brahms (1833-1897)

Rhapsody in B minor Op.79 No.1 (1879)

Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

from Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses (1847-1852)

1 Invocation (1847-52)

5 Pater Noster

6 Hymne de l’enfant à son réveil

7 Funerailles

Franz Schubert (1797-1828)

Piano Sonata in B flat major D.960 (1828)

Molto moderato

Andante sostenuto

Scherzo: allegro

Allegro ma non troppo

Although both Brahms and Liszt were fervent admirers of Schubert and learned much from him, there is little evidence of their allegiance in either the Rhapsody in B minor or the four pieces from Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses. The outer sections of the first of Brahms’s two Rhapsodies are characteristically dramatic in effect and muscular in texture. If the melodic material of the extended and intimately expressive middle section is reminiscent of any other composer it is Schumann rather than Schubert, while the exquisitely oblique harmonies that lead into the recall of the opening section are indicative only of Brahms.

One thing that Liszt did not learn from Schubert was his religiosity - the kind of sensitivity that found inspiration in, for example, the poems published in the four volumes of Alphonse de Lamartine’s Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses in 1830. Addressed by the poet to those ”whose whole existence is a silent hymn to the Divinity and to hope,” they drew from Liszt a parallel collection of ten piano pieces under the same title, not all of them directly connected to Lamartine. The first of them, Invocation, is Lamartine's idea of a “silent hymn to the Divinity” made sonorous in Liszt’s grand manner. Of the next two pieces in this selection, Pater Noster and Hymne de l’enfant à son réveil, both of them modest arrangements of choral pieces, only the latter derives from Lamartine. Funérailles, one of the two most outstanding pieces in the collection, was inspired by the cruelly suppressed Hungarian uprising of October 1849 and has nothing to do with Lamartine either. Although the attractive notion that it was intended as a memorial tribute to Chopin, whose death also occurred in October 1849, is now discredited, it is not impossible that Liszt was marking two sad occasions with one memorial stone. The rumbling echoes of a Chopin in polonaise mode seem to support that conjecture.

Another thing Liszt did not learn from Schubert was his piano writing. As his extravagant editions of the earlier composer’s piano works show, Schubert’s scoring was far too plain for Liszt’s taste. But, of course, it was entirely appropriate to Schubert’s thinking, particularly in the last, longest and greatest of his piano sonatas. In a scarcely interrupted vision of serenity like the Sonata in B flat fussily decorative textures would be seriously out of place. Every note has its purpose - like the trill and turn heard low down in the left hand just after the quiet introduction of the opening theme and then at every major structural interchange in the first movement. The faintly ominous implications associated with that motif intrude only briefly and with no lasting effect on the tranquillity of the slow movement, the delicately elusive Scherzo and the teasingly witty finale.