Harmonies poétiques et réligieuses III

Liszt’s 10-movement cycle Harmonies poétiques et religieuses (Poetic and Religious Harmonies), completed in 1852, is a pinnacle of the Romantic piano repertory. The music brings together the twin polarities of Liszt’s creative world—deep religious spirituality, and soaring Romantic imagination. The project’s high artistic seriousness generally kept Liszt’s spectacular keyboard virtuosity under close control, but even so, there are individual passages—as in the seventh piece, “Funérailles” (“Funeral Rites”)—that challenge the technique of any pianist. Liszt reworked some of the cycle’s material in his usual way over many years, and its final format includes two major masterpieces. “Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude” (“God’s Blessing in Solitude”), inspired by a poem by Alphonse de Lamartine, is a sustained outpouring of lyrical rapture. “Funérailles” is subtitled “October 1849”—the date when the leaders of the 1848 Hungarian nationalist uprising were executed after the Habsburg Empire’s ruthless military response. Some of those leaders had been personal friends of Liszt, and he commemorated them in music of magnificent and outraged emotional power. Some of the shorter pieces, like “Ave Maria”, are arrangements of choral works by Liszt; and the opening “Invocation” and closing “Cantique d’amour” (“Canticle of Love”) share the exalted spiritual world of “Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude”. The most radical creation is “Pensée des morts” (“Memory of the Dead”), whose wild extremes of expression and mood derive from an earlier version, first drafted in 1833.