Liszt: Grande fantaisie symphonique on themes from Berlioz's ‘Lelio', S120

Among the 25 orchestral works that Liszt wrote, the thirteen tone poems make up the biggest single category. He gave these works of ideas their final form during his years as kapellmeister at the Weimar court (1843–59), and dedicated them to his beloved, Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. The numbering of the first editions doesn’t reflect the order of composition: the first tone poem that Liszt composed was Tasso (first performance: 28. August 1849); it was followed (in the order of the first performance) by Bergsinfonie and Prometheus (1850), Orpheus, Les Préludes, Mazeppa and Festklänge (1854), Hungaria (1856), Die Ideale, Héroide funèbre and Hunnenschlacht (1857), and finally Hamlet (1876). Nearly all the tone poems are based on literary sources or historic myths and reflect philosophical ideas, with the exception of Festklänge, which was intended to be the wedding march for Liszt’s planned wedding to Carolyne, and Hungaria, which extols the praises of the composer’s native country. Von der Wiege bis zum Grabe (1881/2) was not written during the Weimar years: this later addition can be seen as an epilogue penned in the wisdom of old age.

Liszt treated the character of Faust in his music in a variety of forms: in the two orchestral episodes after Nikolaus Lenau’s poem of the same name, and in the different Mephisto Waltzes. The Faust Symphony is a study of the three main characters in the Goethe drama, but it also represents a picture "of the nature of Man with his aspirations and flaws, with his fluctuation between guilt and redemption" (Hans Jürgen Meinerts), culminating in the challenge to find true love. Here Liszt introduces the closing chorus with a tenor solo: "Everything transient is but an allegory, the inadequate becomes reality, the indescribable is done; eternal femininity draws us upwards". The Dante Symphony, which is dedicated to Wagner, reflects the process of understanding described in the Divine Comedy, which Dante completed shortly before his death in 1321. In the ‘Inferno’ Liszt sends the Romantic idea of love to hell in the example of Francesca da Rimini qnd Paolo. The opening of ‘Purgatorio’ puts Dante’s words into music: "A gentle blue, poured like oriental sapphire on to the bright firmament"; later follows a fugue marked ‘Lamentoso’ that portrays the process of purification. Liszt originally wanted to add a final section corresponding to Dante’s ‘Paradiso’, but Wagner convinced him that this couldn’t be depicted in music. Thus Liszt left the piece in two movements; however, the ‘Magnificat’ essentially represents Paradise, for the Gregorian magnificat he quotes here with its ethereal female choir is in keeping with the central message of Man finding his fulfilment in the divine. Liszt subsequently added a closing apotheosis to the work. Nowadays, this later addition often falls victim to the tendency to favour the original version, but doing so actually distorts our view of the connections between the two symphonies: ‘Mephisto’ and ‘Inferno’ correspond inversely with one another, as do ‘Faust’ and ‘Purgatorio’. Admittedly, the Dante Symphony goes one step further: where Gretchen was still a real person in the Faust Symphony, Liszt makes Beatrice, whom Dante tries to find in hell, into a mere ideal that no longer appears.

Of Liszt’s ten original compositions for piano and orchestra, at least four can be described as piano concertos, among them Malédiction S. 121. But Liszt only number­ed two of them for publication. Listened to one after the other, they create an impression of extreme opposites. This much is apparent from the basic keys of E flat major and A major, which couldn’t be farther away from one another. The majestic Piano concerto no.1 is clearly structured in three movements, while the second concerto has a single movement with a six-part structure that superimposes variation and sonata form. Notwithstanding, the two works seem to refer to each other. As Liszt also appeared for many years as a concert pianist, he also left quite a number of arrangements for piano and orchestra of other composers’ works. In most such fantasias, he used well-known themes by composers like Berlioz and Beethoven for musical reflections that are formally independent. Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy, on the other hand, he turned into a captivating piano concerto, even though it does stick for the most part to the form of the original.

The first complete German recording of Franz Liszt's 13 tone poems, his two symphonies and the big works for piano and orchestra. Recorded by the Leipzig Gewandhaus under Kurt Masur in 1980–81, this issue set international standards in the Liszt discography.