Alan Walker

Liszt and the Lied

In 1847, when he was thirty-five years old, Franz Liszt abandoned his fabulous career as a travelling virtuoso and settled in Weimar in order to devote himself more fully to musical composition. The thirteen years he spent in the city were among the most productive of his life. It was there that he composed twelve of his symphonic poems, the "Faust" and "Dante" symphonies, the two piano concertos, and the B minor piano sonata.

Liszt also came to maturity as a Lieder composer during his Weimar years. He had already begun to write songs ten years earlier, while he was resident in Italy (the three "Petrarch Sonnets" were first sketched there), and by the time he got to Weimar he had a dozen or more Lieder in his portfolio. He now added to them, and eventually produced an impressive collection of seventy pieces in this genre.

The songs are strangely neglected today. They rarely turn up in the modern Lieder recital, and some of them are unknown even to specialists. This is surprising, for a closer acquaintance with the best of them suggests that they represent a "missing link" between Schumann and Hugo Wolf. In fact, the history of the German Lied is incomplete without taking Liszt into account.

Such a view may seem difficult to sustain. After all, Liszt was born in Hungary, spent his formative years in France, and then travelled through so many different countries that he is often described as "cosmopolitan". Yet the evidence is there. Liszt's first language was German; and the years that he lived and worked in Weimar - the city of Goethe and Schiller - brought him into daily contact with German poets, painters, playwrights, and musicians. Some of his best settings are of such poets as Heine, Hoffmann von Fallers-leben, Uhland, Rellstab, and of course Goethe and Schiller themselves. And Liszt had other credentials, too. During his virtuoso years he had transcribed more than 50 Schubert songs, and 20 more by Schumann, Mendelssohn, and other composers for solo piano - arrangements which reveal an insider's knowledge of the originals. And then, when he settled in Weimar, he conducted at the court opera and worked with some of the finest singers in Germany. In short, he was very well equipped to write Lieder, and he understood the human voice as well as anybody in the 19th century.

[...]

Title page of "Gastibelza", first edition, Nr. 6 in Buch der Lieder-Poésies Lyriques, containing six songs by Liszt to poems by Victor Hugo. Berlin, 1843, Schlesinger. Liszt Ferenc Accademy of Music, Budapest, Research Library for Music History, LGy 40.873.

Alan Walker

has just published the third volume of his biography of Franz Liszt (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc, New York).