Liszt never forgot, not even in his most rebellious moments, the strong connection that he had with the Catholic church, ever since he was a child. “You belong to art, not the church,” Ádám Liszt admonished his son, when the 15-year-old Franz Liszt, tired of his role as the celebrated “artistic-household pet” of the salons, began to show increasing interest in religious literature and even in priesthood as a career. Paternal authority won the day, but after many successes as a piano virtuoso, as well as as a composer, and great storms in his private life, in the 1860’s Liszt felt a calling again to turn to faith and the Catholic church. ”I entered the church order – but certainly not out of any disdain for the world, or even less because I had grown weary of art…” – he claimed after he had taken minor church orders in April 1865 and so became a cleric. Indeed, as his faith deepened with the years he spent in Rome, he did not detach from the world, either: he was still an ardent promoter of modern music and of the admired Richard Wagner’s business, and he continued educating a whole mob of students in Budapest, Weimar and Rome to become passionate piano musicians. But at the same time, he dedicated an increasing role to sacral music in his works, and even his ”worldly” compositions bore discernible traces of his deep, personal faith. Liszt could never become the ”new Palestrina”, a reformer of church music, as Pope Pius  IX  would have wanted, but he has still contributed a great deal to sacred music with his oeuvre: oratorios, masses, organ music and legends for piano(eg. St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds), which regularly create an elevated atmosphere in the most secular concert rooms.

Liszt followed Goethe’s footsteps when, as a celebrated world star, he undertook the responsibility to organize the musical life of Weimar. In 1849 he composed the Festive March For The Goethe Centenary for the late poet-master’s 100th birthday anniversary, which was full of harmonic innovations, despite being allegedly an occassional piece. Some examples are: the three-note broken chords immediately at the beginning, which were very uncommon at the time, and also the peculiar, ”dark” minor accords. There were further surprising rhytmical elements in the short trio section and then in the final coda. Liszt composed this piece on the piano, and he trusted his colleagues, August Conradi and Joachim Raffra with the orchestration. 8 years later, for the inauguration of Goethe and Schiller’s famous memorial, Liszt significantly reworked and extended the march, and this time he did the orchestration himself as well. At the current concert we will hear the first version, the original Liszt composition with the new orchestration by Zoltán Kocsis.

Obermann, the epistolary novel of the French writer, Étienne Pivert de Senancourt (1770-1846), was the inspiration for Liszt to compose the Valley of Obermann, which was included in the first volume of Years of Pilgrimage. Liszt, as usual, put a lot of energy into rewriting and refining the piece of work, which begins – after a quote from Byron’s Child Harold – with the following lines of Senancourt: “What do I want? Who am I? What do I ask of nature?”
The piece was included in the Years of Pilgrimage volume in 1855 as a symphonic poem for piano, and through a series of transcriptions, virtuosity had become a tool to serve dramatic expressionism. This is manifested most typically in the opening tune in the bass register, heating up in the recitativo, growing more and more powerful and finally leading to an excruciating and cathartic end.

The deeply religious Liszt made several transcriptions of the sacred theme of Ave Maria.  One of these is the piano piece from 1862, subtitled Die Glocken von Rom, which will now be heard in Zoltán Kocsis’s orchestration, just like the two preceding pieces. The conductor-composer made the following comments about his work: ”We have a good reason to presume that a part of Liszt’s compositions have only subsisted as piano pieces because perhaps it would have taken too much effort to orchestrate them and then to perform them with and orchestra. Not to mention the legendary piano technique of Liszt, which was capable of creating the illusion of a full orchestra performance, according to the contemporaries. Concerning Liszt’s orchestrations, however, even his comtemporaries were on different opinions. To the modern ears, his structures are sometimes surprisingly simple and sometimes unreasonably complicated. We would be naive to think that Liszt expected the same intensity or coherence from an orchestra that he could produce on his own instrument. As I was working on the orchestration, I tried to use all the orchestrational forms that have been developed after Lisztian innovations, by composers unmistakeably influenced by Liszt. I was ever so careful not to fall into the trap of being anachronistic, and I tried to stick to the instrumentalisation of the typical Liszt-orchestrations.”

Liszt composed the 13th psalm for tenor solo, choir and orchestra in the summer of 1855, during his Weimar-period. The psalm, first performed in November that year, ”rose from the abundance of the heart” – he wrote. About the tenor part, which is the rendition of the king’s complaints, he said the following: ”I allowed myself to sing, and David’s emotions of desperation spread into my flesh and blood”. These are the first sentences of the psalm, begging for the liberation of the soul: ”How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?” (Psalm 13.2)