Zoltán Kocsis has composed a veritable suite from piano works by Liszt, working entirely in Liszt's spirit who himself had made innumerable arrangements and transcriptions of other composers' music. The 19th-century master often used the medium of transcription to draw attention to neglected or little-known compositions; likewise, Kocsis for the most part explored the hidden recesses of Liszt's enormous output. In compiling the suite, he paid great attention to the balance between contrasting moods and tempi, from the solemn opening march all the way to the fast dance finale.
Like so many other works by Liszt, the Festive March for Goethe's Birthday exists in several versions. In its first incarnation, the work was written in 1849 to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Goethe's birth. It had been only a short time since Liszt had arrived in Weimar, Goethe's city, to take up the position of music director with Grand Duke Carl Friedrich's orchestra. Eight years later, when the famous Goethe-Schiller monument was unveiled in Weimar, Liszt thoroughly revised and expanded his march.
Originally, both versions were written for piano solo, although the festive occasion, of course, called for a full orchestra in both instances. Liszt, however, only orchestrated the second version himself; in 1849 he delegated the task to his assistants August Conradi and Joachim Raff, who each carried out the assignment separately. It is to this early version that Kocsis returned with his resplendent new arrangement.
Even in as popular and utilitarian a genre as the march, Liszt would not do without some harmonic innovations. Right at the beginning, a broken augmented chord – a relative novelty in 1849 – appears as an artistic manifesto of sorts. More surprises follow later; in particular, one would not expect so many “dark” minor-mode sonorities in a festive piece. In the short Trio section Liszt plays some subtle games with the rhythm and the meter; this same material returns at the end of the work, with even more rhythmic irregularities added.
Liszt used the title Valse oubliée (“Forgotten Waltz”) in a total of four works, all from his final years. The first Forgotten Waltz – the best-known of the four – was written in 1881, the other three in 1883.
The second of the waltzes barely resembles a waltz at all. Its jagged opening melody is, at first, devoid of any melody, and when one appears (as late as in measure 81!), one would still be hard pressed to dance the waltz to it. It is not until m. 111 that we hear the typical “oom-pah” bass of the waltz, but even there, the dance character is undermined by constant interruptions in the melody. Liszt uses an unusual word as his performancec instruction: garbato (“charming, pleasant”), a character expressed by the parallel sixths that were also dear to Brahms.
The ending is even more removed from the world of the waltz, as the musical material disintegrates before our very eyes (or ears) and flies away, as it were, on the wings of a series of high-pitched trills.
Vallée d'Obermann is certainly the best-known among the movements of the present suite. No dance or march, it is a grandiose dramatic tableau and one of the earliest, and most powerful, examples of Lisztian program music.
Étienne Pivert de Senancour (1770-1843) published his novel Oberman (Obermann in later editions) in 1804. The protagonist is a real Byronic hero years before Byron's Manfred and Childe Harold; like them, he is estranged from society and seeks relief for his intense emotional suffering by communing with a nature he worships. Senancour spent many years in Switzerland, and the memory of the Alps was a major source of inspiration for the novel, which was written in epistolary form.
The program of Liszt's piece is expressed in the three quotes – two from Senancour and one from Byron – printed in the score.
What would I? What am I? What must I ask of Nature?….Every cause is invisible, every aim deceptive; every form changes, all continuance comes to an end….I feel, I exist simply to be the prey of untamable desires, to be besotted by the spell of a fantastic world, and to stand aghast at its dazzling falsity.
Inexpressible responsiveness, alike the charm and torment of our idle years, profound sense of a Nature everywhere overwhelming and everywhere inscrutable;infinite passion, ripened wisdom, ecstatic self-surrender, everything a human heart can hold of need and utter weariness, I felt them all, sounded the depths of all, during that memorable night. I took an ominous stride towards the age of decline; I swallowed up ten years of my life.
Senancour, transl. J. Anthony Barnes
Could I embody and unbosom now
That which is most within me, – could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul, heart, mind, passions, feelings, strong or weak,
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel, and yet breathe – into one word,
And that one word were Lightning, I would speak;
But as it is, I live and die unheard,
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.
Byron: Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
The first version of Vallée d'Obermann goes back to the 1830s and was published in 1842 as part of Album d'un voyageur. After settling in Weimar, Liszt completely revised the work. Although the technical demands remained undiminished, the emphasis shifted from virtuoso display to dramatic expression. Similarly to the symphonic poems on which he was working at the same time, the idea of “character variation” comes strongly to the fore. Thus, the expressive opening melody, first heard in the bass register, becomes intensely passionate in the “recitative” section before pressing on, ever livelier and more powerful, towards the stunning final dénouement.
It was in this form that Vallée d'Obermann was published in 1855 as part of Book I (“Switzerland”) of the Années de pčlerinage. Liszt attached great significance to this piece. When, around 1880, Eduard Lassen arranged it for piano trio, Liszt composed a new introduction, and then proceeded to write not one but two piano-trio versions of his own.
The fundamental idea of the Valse oubliée No. 3 is an ascending scale fragment of only three notes. Liszt exploited this fragment with considerable rhythmic and tonal diversity. At first, Kocsis's orchestration is limited almost completely to woodwind and horns – the strings are initially represented just by the principals; only later does the entire string section enter. Liszt's piano part makes frequent use of the keyboard's uppermost octave; thus Kocsis featured the piccolo and the highest strings of the harp rather prominently.
The ending of the piece is surprising: both surviving versions conclude in an “open” way, as if left “hanging in the air.” In the final version, we hear the three-note motif all by itself, without any accompaniment and pianissimo. Of cadence there is nary a trace: the music simply “fades out.” In his orchestration, Kocsis expressed this by giving the third note from the end to four solo violins, the penultimate one to two, and the last one to a single player.
Liszt loved and admired Chopin, and consciously emulated several of the Polish master's favourite genres, including the etude, the ballade, and the polonaise. His only mazurka was written the year after Chopin's premature death, and is definitely an hommage, borrowing many concrete stylistic elements from Chopin's work. The most striking of these, perhaps, is the ostinato accompaniment in the trio section.
It is interesting that, similarly to the Goethe march that opened our set, the very first cadence of this major-mode work is in the minor. This is a characteristic touch, yet it doesn't change the joyful, triumphant fundamental character of either piece.