All of Liszt's known works for cello and piano are represented in this recording. Due to years of neglect and to the difficulty of locating some of the unpublished pieces, much of the composer's chamber music remained unknown until recently. Despite this relative obscurity, the pieces for cello and piano are among his most inspired and moving creations.

Except for the Consolations and the Sonetto 123 del Petrarca, whose piano versions date from the 1850s, all of the works for cello and piano were written in the composer's old age, in the 1870s and 1880s. Departing from much of Liszt's earlier œuvre, there is a marked rejection of any virtuoso element. They tend to sparseness, even austerity, where not a single note is superfluous. In their use of harmony they are often daring and point to the future ; in form they defy convention. Sometimes they appear as fleeting fragments, and enigmatically break off without really concluding. In this sense, they are astonishingly modern and foreshadow many of the compositional devices of the twentieth century.

But to speak of these works in terms of technical " innovation " would elude what is perhaps most significant about them. For we would be wrong to sever the elegiac late music from the tormented emotions out of which it grew. From the 1880s on, Liszt frequently tottered on the brink of his private abyss, where visions of death, desolation and the afterlife became an obsession.

Yet he was well-aware that such obsessions could be sublimated to the highest of artistic aims. The very strangeness and fragmentary nature of his forms and textures --the fruit of troubled visions-- engender multifarious meanings, and an abrupt shift in seemingly matter-of-fact musical discourse may achieve the effect of opening a trap-door in the texture of 'ordinary' reality, allowing the imagination to enter those states and modes which we dimly apprehend in our rare moments of irrational perception.

Liszt the mystic was quite lucid as to where aesthetically this music was leading him, but was nonetheless conscious that such 'experiments' would only be met with incomprehension and disdain. This is why he positively discouraged his students from performing his late works, for fear of harming their careers. He nonetheless went ahead penning further 'worthless' pieces-a catharsis for the pervasive sadness that threatened to engulf everything he did-with the faint hope that one day they might be understood.

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The two Elegies belong to the substantial category of music for mourning in which Liszt, in the words of Alan Walker, "raised grief to the level of a high art form. " The first Elegy, subtitled " Slumber Song in the Grave, " was written in remembrance of Marie von Mouchanoff, a close friend and patroness of the composer. It was first performed for a memorial concert organized in her honor on May 22, 1875, in its version for cello and piano. Liszt himself describes the piece as " more for dreaming than for playing. " Yet the dream is a troubled one, with moments of passion and exaltation ; peace returns only at the work's conclusion. The second Elegy was written in 1877 and is a soulful lament with a middle section of otherwordly etherealness. Indeed, both elegies are impressionistic in many aspects, and prefigure the music of Debussy.

The music of lost memories and the pain of that loss, the Romance oubliée was one of the " forgotten pieces," as Liszt liked to refer to them, since they were forgotten before they were even played. The cello and piano version was published in 1881, although the origin of the piece, as a song, can be traced as far back as 1843. Tinged with melancholy throughout, the music recedes further into intimacy in a coda reminiscent of the slow movement in Berlioz's Harold en Italie.

The Sonetto 123 del Petrarca, a recent transcription by Eberhard Jüdt of the original piano piece of 1858, belongs to the second volume (Italy) of the monumental Années de Pèlerinage. The opening stanzas of Petrarch's poem evoke images of celestial beauty :

"I'vidi in terra angelici costumi " Yes, I beheld on earth angelic grace,
E celesti bellezze al mondo sole, And charms divine which mortals rarely see,
Tal che di rimembrar mi giova e dole… Such as both glad and pain the memory … "

Both contemplative and tender, the melodic line traverses episodes of intensity and euphoria, only to return to the confident sonorities of aeolian harps.

The chamber music version (cello or violin) of Die Zelle in Nonnenwerth was written in 1883, although it has its origin in a song Liszt composed during his first visit to Nonnenwerth, an island in the Rhine between Bonn and Koblenz. It was the site of a famous Benedictine abbey for seven hundred years, where Liszt, Marie d'Agoult and their children spent their summer holidays in 1841,1842 and 1843. The music calls forth the nostalgia and irretrievable loss associated with the place. Throughout, images and memories, impalpable and ghost-like, slip by--only to vanish into the realm of silence.

La lugubre gondola mimics the swaying, solemnal procession of a funeral gondola. The cello and piano version-- written in 1885 and based on the solo piano piece of the same year--was not published until 1974. Intensely dramatic episodes echoing Wagner build to a cry of despair, even panic, as the music unveils the terrible shadows lurking beyond the broad daylight of waking life. A state of being transcending pain and death is intimated in the hypnotic and stagnant middle section, and the coda, seventeen bars longer in the cello and piano version, dissipates into an eerie, deathly hush.

If the late pieces reflect an aching soul in turmoil, the Consolations hearken back to a sunnier period of confidence and grace. Inspired by an anthology of poems by Saint-Beuve, the set of six miniatures were completed during the period 1849-1850. The version for cello and piano was realized by Jules de Swert (1843-1891), a renowned cellist, teacher, and composer. Liszt liked the transcription, and even suggested in a letter to de Swert that he preferred it to the originals. He also specially composed for this version a passage linking nos. 1 and 4 . With a naturalness and conciseness rarely present in Liszt's earlier works, the Consolations are in turn suave, contemplative, confiding, and fervently religious, all the time exuding the optimism of a cloudless faith.

THE 'LISZT' PIANO

The piano used for this recording is the " Liszt-Flügel " from Bayreuth, a Steingräber from 1873 on which Liszt himself played on many occasions. He may have performed on it for the last time on June 27, 1886. The instrument, extremely modern for its time and rich in colors and overtones, was designed to match the decor of the " Rokokosaal, " the concert hall in the Steingräber House. It is the only model of its kind existing.

NOTES ON INTERPRETATION

Speaking on interpretation, Liszt sometimes referred to what he considered to be the " Pontius Pilate offence " in art. In other words, he rejected those musicians who ritually washed their hands of the works they played, who claimed it sufficient to let the notes 'speak for themselves,' and who sacrificed emotional involvement on the high altar of 'objectivity.' Music being an invitation to sympathy, there was nothing more deleterious to Liszt than the classical (today modernist) cult of anonymity. He often remarked that notation proved inadequate to the task of transcribing all the variegated shades of human emotion and poetry he demanded from music . For instance, on several occasions he explicitly recommended tempo modifications when not otherwise indicated in the score : " I don't play according to the measure … music must not be subject to a uniform balance ; it must be kindled or slowed down with judgement and according to the meaning it carries. " And again : " a metronomical performance is certainly tiresome and nonsensical ; time and rhythm must be (adapted to) and identified with the melody, the harmony, the accent, and the poetry… But how indicate all this? I shudder at the thought of it. " This advice doubtlessly would have applied to the works for cello and piano, in which Liszt often aspires to recreate the spirit of spontaneous improvisation. Aware of these practices, as of the widespread use of portamenti (or audible slides) by nineteenth-century string players, the artist may add them to his intepretative reservoir, from which the creative imagination intuitively draws. At the least, this understanding may help to dispel some stylistic automatisms in performance and the need to adhere to them, simply because they are 'of our time.' This said, and however enticing Wellsian fantasies of time-travel may be, insight into historical styles--as well as the use of original instruments--are not so much a vehicle for reconstructing an ultimately unattainable past, as one means among many of defamiliarizing us with the work we thought we knew, and creating it afresh.

- Eric Le Van