Wigmore Hall
Années
de pèlerinage, première année: ‘Suisse’, S 160
Années
de pèlerinage, deuxième année: ‘Italie’, S 161
Années
de pèlerinage, troisième année,
S 163
On 27 April, Louis Lortie
celebrated his sixtieth birthday. I can only presume the celebrations were not
unduly arduous, since he played all three books of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage – omitting only the ‘Venezia e Napoli’
supplement to the second book – the following evening at the Wigmore Hall. If
the best parties are a gift from the host to those invited, then this must
surely rank amongst them. Some of these pieces one hears with reasonable
frequency in the concert hall, although even the best-known come nowhere near
over-familiarity: this is Liszt, not Chopin. Some one rarely hears at all: there
were certainly some I, a keen Lisztian, was hearing for the first time in
concert. But to hear them all together proved decidedly more than the sum of
its parts. It was an extraordinary feat, yes, but more than that, it was a welcome
tribute; more than that too, it was an opportunity to hear the composer’s
development, transformation, and ongoing truthfulness to his inner self over a
period of almost half a century.
The chronology is complex, and here
is not the place to go into detail, but many of the pieces in the first, ‘Swiss’
book, published in 1855, have their roots in pieces written in the second half
of the 1830s, later published as the 1842 Album
d’un voyageur. The Romantic idea of the wayfarer thus becomes inscribed in the
chronology and, implicitly at least, in the hearing and rehearing, performance
and re-performance under way before a note has even been played. At any rate,
the opening ‘Chapelle de Guillaume Tell’ left one in no doubt concerning its Schillerian
genesis, its declamatory opening – so often with Liszt, as with Berlioz and
Wagner, musical lines strain to speak, as if recitative without words – preparing
the way to yield, yet also announcing the instrument itself (here a
bright-toned Fazioli) as equal progenitor to music both general and specific.
Very much a curtain-raiser, it ended open-endedly, ushering us ‘Au lac de
Wallenstadt’. Perhaps Lortie might have yielded more there, but there was
something fascinating in hearing the ‘sigh of the waves and the cadence of the
oars’ (Marie d’Agoult, quoted in Kenneth Hamilton’s programme note) founded
upon a rock-solid basso continuo. Poetic musico-historical licence? As often
with Liszt: yes and no. The ensuing ‘Pastorale’ echoed Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’
Sonata as much as the Swiss countryside, placing both strands in magical
dialogue, leading us ‘Au bord d’une source’, in which Lortie showed himself
unafraid to use plenty of pedal for atmosphere, creating a wash of fioriture
such as to send puritans – whatever Liszt may have been, he was certainly not
that – dashing for cover. The ‘Orage’ that followed would surely have left them
cowed: splendidly grandiloquent in a virtuosity that, for composer and pianist
alike, never came near ‘mere’ virtuosity.
If melodic lines had spoken in ‘Guillaume
Tell’, they sang, as if lines from Eugene
Onegin or some other such Romantic opera, in ‘Vallée d’Obermann’. As the
melody passed between the hands, gorgeous harmonies – never ‘merely’ gorgeous –
spoke and sang of nobility and idealism
as much as Nature and sensual experience. Seraphic passion, melting
belligerence: opposites attracted and confused in typically Romantic fashion.
This may have fallen more than midway through the book; it nonetheless felt
like its heart. And so, the ‘Eglogue’ sounded as if a reinvention of the ‘Pastorale’
– until, that is, like the book as a whole, it very much went on its own way. ‘Le
mal du pays’ came as a necessary corrective, the world’s darkness to the fore,
its strange harmonies duly unsettling. Finally, the ringing of ‘Les cloches de
Genève’ proceeded both with otherworldly purity and ‘impressionist’
presentiment. Corrosive – or potentially corrosive – sounds in the bass proved
enigmatic rather than Mephistophelian, which is probably as it should be. They
were, in any case, rare. Liszt’s citation here of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, ‘I live not in myself, but I become a
portion of that around me’, sounded apt as ever.
‘Sposalizio’ took us
immediately to the opening of a new volume, illuminated by no less than
Raphael. Debussy’s First Arabesque seemed already to have been written and surpassed,
confronted by the more strenuous humanism of Michelangelo in ‘Il penseroso’.
The ‘Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa’, heavy-handed in its jauntiness, I have
never been able to warm to, but surely I miss its point. The three Petrarch
Sonnets, however, I have long adored – and did so here. No.47 came as blissful,
Romantic relief: metrical freedom, melody, harmony, voice-leading as one in a
vision of expectancy and ardour. No.104 complemented, contrasted, deepened, the
music breathing ‘as if’ sung, rather than slavishly imitating; a piano is a
piano, just as a pianist is a pianist. No.123 brought together and extended,
dreamlike in the best sense, rhetoric at the service of musical poetry. There
was much incentive to abandon hope as we entered the final number of the
Italian Book, ‘Après une lecture du Dante, fantasia quasi sonata’, in a duly
Catholic performance of deeply Catholic music. However fancifully, one could
imagine Liszt sitting down at the piano to quasi-improvise this response to his
reading of Dante. That fantasia quality is surely of the essence here, in a way
it is not in the more ‘worked-out’ B minor Sonata; this is an album-leaf or set
of album-leaves, however superior, and so it sounded here, in hallucinatory,
self-transforming flow. It thrilled, but thrilled with substance: there is
nothing ‘mere’ to this music.
The tolling of the ‘Angelus’
opened the third book: ‘Rome’ in all but name, as Hamilton notes, albeit with
the strange exception of the funeral march for Mexico’s Emperor Maximilian. Here
there was unquestionably a sense of time having passed: not quite the third act
of Parsifal, but perhaps – again with
Rome in mind – of Tannhäuser. Again,
there was a sense, illusory or otherwise, of remembrance, of reinventing the
worlds of the second book in particular: even the Salvator Rosa piece. (Yes, I had
been wrong.) Again, there was nothing ‘mere’ to this act of remembrance, as
Liszt took us on neue Bahnen (as
Schumann had once foretold of Brahms). Or so we think. Is there anything new
under the sun? Again, the answer came: yes and no. The exultancy achieved was,
aptly, both genuine and a little tired. And how Liszt’s harmonies represented,
in his celebrated phrase, the hurling of a ‘lance into the boundless realms of
the future’.
Two threnodies followed, both
responses to the idea – and doubtless the ‘reality’ – of ‘Aux cyprès de la
Villa d’Este’. There was no denying the lateness here, but there was nothing
generic either to music or performance; instead, we drew connections, noted and
felt affinities, in a setting that afforded chiaroscuro whilst yet approaching
twilight. The wonder one can feel in harmonic progression registered as
strongly as ever – and more unnervingly. Here, especially in the second piece,
was the melancholy of the (not quite) swansong. From cypresses to water, for ‘Les
jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este’: the waters sparkled, whilst never quite effacing
– why should they? – what had preceded them. Glitter surrounded a line as clear
as anything in the first and second books, Liszt both the same and transformed.
‘Sunt lacrymae rerum’ offered further reminiscence, remembrance – whether that
of Aeneas or something more personal to Liszt, to us – and incomplete,
transformative synthesis. The ‘Marche funèbre’ likewise proved an idea familiar
yet rethought, reimagined, reinterpreted, at least bordering on the realm of the
‘omnitonal’ the young Liszt had taken from the theorist, François-Joseph Fétis.
But it is with the Eucharistic exhortation, ‘Sursum corda’ that the collection
ends. There was darkness to the call, but there was likewise release from that
darkness. Lortie relished this final piece in all its strangeness – strange,
that is, so long as we listened. It could only have made sense coming as it did
at the close; make sense of a sort, though, it did.
