Années de pèlerinage III

Années de pèlerinage: Troisième année (Years of Pilgrimage: Third Year) is the greatest piano work of Liszt’s old age. He assembled this seven-movement cycle in stages between 1867 and 1877, at a time when his music had become more introspective than before, and its harmonic style increasingly radical. The general context of the Third Year is the ageing Liszt’s semi-permanent residence in Italy. The cycle’s central masterpiece is Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este (The Fountains at the Summer Villa), a rapturous depiction of the hundreds of fountains in the gardens of the Villa d’Este, in Tivoli near Rome. Meanwhile the music also reflects on a quotation from St John’s Gospel: “But the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into eternal life.” On either side of this centrepiece are two groups of three works each. After the opening “Angelus!” (the bell calling Roman Catholics to prayer), there are two meditations both named “Aux cyprès de la Villa d’Este”, where Liszt’s mood among the cypress trees shifts uneasily between brooding and exaltation. The final group begins with the startling modernistic soundworld of “Sunt lacrimae rerum" (“The Tearfulness of Things”, a quotation from the Latin poet Virgil), followed by “Funeral March in memory of Maximilian I, Emperor of Mexico”. Finally comes “Sursum corda” (“Lift up your hearts”), a defiant and magnificent response to the dark soul-searching that dominated Liszt’s last years.