Cosima Liszt - Liszt's second daughter - had exploded his world in 1870 by divorcing her husband and marrying Liszt’s friend and colleague, Richard Wagner. (Liszt was a serious Catholic, and divorce meant the excommunication of his only living daughter from the church.) The whole situation seemed likely to emotionally tear Liszt apart: that he somehow remained stable is a tribute to his personal strength, and likely also to the strength of his faith, an aspect of his personality that is often greatly misunderstood. It was also in 1870 that Liszt arranged his great set of variations for organ, “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” for piano: he had written them in 1862, in the wake of his first daughter Blandine’s tragic death, not long after she gave birth to Liszt's grandson. Were these stressful personal events somehow connected in Liszt’s mind?
Liszt’s variations on Bach’s “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” (“Tears, complaints, cares, and quailing”) can stand with the best variations of the 19th century, including even the Variations Sérieuses of Mendelssohn or the Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel by Brahms. The theme of the work comes from the bass of the second movement of Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata of the same name (it is the first choral movement in the cantata, “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen”). This is a typical Baroque figure, a lamenting descending chromatic bass line, which Bach also uses in his B minor Mass. Only four measures long, the clear challenge for anyone writing variations upon this ground bass is to create larger structures out of groups of variations. Liszt writes sixty variations on these four bars, plus an introduction and sections of free fantasy and recitative which extend the idea beyond four measures.
Liszt’s three musical collections entitled Années de Pèlerinage, or Years of Pilgrimage, contain some of the greatest music he ever wrote. The first two books originated in the 1830s, the third and final collection dates from the last decade of his life. Each book is intimately connected with an important phase of his life, and each book shows a different aspect of Liszt’s many-faceted personality.
It is somewhat astonishing that the third and final volume of Années des Pèlerinage was ever written at all. After his retirement from the concert stage in 1847 and the somewhat abrupt ending of his time in Weimar as conductor of the Weimar orchestra a little over a decade later, Liszt eventually settled into a tripartite existence: he spent about four months of every year in Weimar, where pianists from all over the world came to study with him (he offered master classes, not individual lessons: every major pianist of the next two generations studied with Liszt; today’s Weimar is most appreciative of Liszt, as the Musikhochschule in that city is known as the Franz Liszt Conservatory); he spent about four months in Budapest, where he helped found the Budapest Conservatory (known today as the Franz Liszt Academy of Music); and he spent four months in or near Rome, visiting (but not living with) his companion since 1847, the Princess Carolyn Sayn von Wittgenstein, sometimes teaching a student or two (including the composer and pianist Giovanni Sgambati) and finding a peaceful retreat where he could compose.
His eventual favourite abode near Rome was the Villa d’Este, owned by his friend Cardinal Hohenlohe (who would later be elected Pope). He enjoyed not only the isolated guest house, but also the magnificent fountains and huge cypresses of the grounds. It was Hohenlohe who talked Liszt into obtaining the lower orders of the priesthood, which is why so many photos of the older Franz Liszt show him wearing a cassock.
*Programme note excerpts written by Charles Foreman.
Experience an evening dedicated to an exclusive all-Liszt program with pianist Charles Foreman on Saturday, February 17 at Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall, Rozsa Centre.
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