On Catholic Imagination, Part 3: Art & Religion in Liszt's Piano Music

Episode Topic: Art & Religion in Liszt's Piano Music (https://go.nd.edu/273a1e) 

Discover the profound intersection of faith and music in the life of Franz Liszt. A recent event featuring musicologist Nick Chung and pianist Isaac Parlin explored how the composer’s deep Catholic faith shaped his masterpieces, challenging the narrative of 19th-century art as a substitute for religion.

Featured Speakers:

• Nicholas Teh, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre Dame
• Isaac Parlin, Master's Student of Music in Piano Performance, The Juilliard School
• Nicholas Chong, Assistant Professor of Musicology, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University

Read this episode's recap over on the University of Notre Dame's open online learning community platform, ThinkND: https://go.nd.edu/e43512. 

This podcast is a part of the ThinkND Series titled On Catholic Imagination. (https://go.nd.edu/78e374)

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Transcript

Welcome and Introduction

Speaker 10 7:22

Welcome everyone, welcome friends and guests to, uh, this Friday session titled Art of Religion and Art of Religion with ScantoVisa. It is such a pleasure. On behalf of us today, my friends Nick Chung and Isaac Parlin. Professor Chung is assistant professor of musicology at the Mason Brough School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He received his PhD from Columbia University, where he also served as a postdoctoral fellow in Columbia's academic tour curriculum, teaching at Drake Book Center. Professor Chung specialized in the history of Western art music during the long 19th century in Germany and Austria. His first monogram highly anticipated. The Calvert Bay building is available for free order from the Los Angeles University Press. And with Janet Twan, he's also a co-editor of Rethinking Beethoven and the Enlightenment. Or come in, Drone Cambridge University Press. In addition to his musicology of musical arts portrayed as, Professor Chopp holds a master's degree in orchestral conducting from the University of Cincinnati. Um, it's also a pleasure to welcome Isaac Carlin from the Juilliard School. Isaac's doing a master's of music and chiata performance at the Juilliard School, where he's in the studio of Jerome Lowenthal. And you have it, a fancy. I guess that makes him the academic sibling of Viking of Alatia. Isaac holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music and Russian Language and Culture from Columbia University, where he was awarded the Louis Sable Prize in Arts upon graduation. During his time in Columbia, he also conducted the Coimbatore University Bach Society Orchestra and Choir in repertoire written from Bach. Good afternoon,

Speaker 2 9:50

everybody. Thank you for coming. This is a lot of people, and, uh, I'm a little bit nervous, which I not often, not often, and what a performance, though, by, by Isaac of that amazing piece. So maybe we'll start off, uh, with something, you know, just quite basic. Uh, Isaac, if I could just invite you to tell us about that piece, uh, maybe a little bit about the composer and then maybe expand a little bit, uh, as to, uh, the theme or the thinking behind the, the mini program you've put, put together for us this afternoon. So,

Speaker 10 10:25

for those who don't know, this was a Bulgarian pianist and composer.

Speaker 3 10:29

Um, his dates are 1811 to 1886. And the first piece on the program is Basilizio, comes from his largest collection of pianifices, which he wrote, um, in different stages of his life. And they're divided into three books, twelve when around two and a half hours of music. So this is just one movement out of, uh, dozens. Um, this wrote these pieces while he was abroad. So he was born in basically June 95 Hungary and, uh, moved to Vienna when he was a child and spent a lot of his adult life in Paris. Um, but here of his first book of the years of pilgrimage when he was living in Switzerland with his sort of mistress of the time, uh, Countess Marie de Gaulle. And those pieces are largely nature-inspired, and they ask some philosophical questions, but they're not exactly religious questions. Um, the second book Liszt wrote in Italy, um, was also at the Comtesse d uh, only a couple years after his time in Switzerland. This is in the mid-1830s, mid to late 1830s. So Liszt was actually around my age. I'm 23, he was 24, 5, writing music that opened the program. And the second year is mostly inspired by art, so this piece in particular was inspired by Raphael's painting, The Marriage of the Virgin. And as such, it's kind of the most sacred, inspired work in the second year. And it's only until the third year of pilgrimage, which was really decades later, in his seventies, um, that he starts connecting his art in a very visceral way to this outlook thing. Um, yeah, so esposo y tío means marriage, and the idea of the piece is that Liszt presents a few themes and then combines them, so there's kind of the opening five-note theme, armory, that happens again and again throughout the piece. Then there's a sort of slower, written-in-orange-type chorale sitting sort of processional, and he unites them, which is kind of a musical image of two becoming one. At least that's my interpretation of the piece.

Speaker 2 12:33

Do you wanna maybe, uh, give us an idea of what that sounds like real quick?

Speaker 3 12:41

So the piece starts with this figure. And it happens to be this. It's

Speaker 4 12:55

a slow bit. Um, and then there's the chord L.

Speaker 5 13:05

They're combined.

Exploring Liszt's Works and Themes

Speaker 2 13:22

Thumb. So, um, it was Nick Tay who really sort of threw the two of us together, and I, I said yes to this before I even know what I was supposed to do. Uh, and I wasn't aware of what Isaac was going to be playing, but when we met up for the first time a few weeks ago, um, I was pleasantly surprised, uh, that Isaac had put together this, this program. Um, because it connected a lot with, um, some themes and some topics I've been teaching. I'm not, not primarily, you know, in any way actually a sort of LIS expert, but I, I, I do teach a little bit on LIS. Um, and when I teach on romanticism, I try to kind of, uh, throw in some recent. Scholarship on 19th century music, um, and in this scholarship of the last 20 or 25 years, there's been a real movement to sort of recover his Catholicism. Um, so there are a number of superficial facts about this Catholicism that have been well known. Uh, for instance, his father was quite devout, uh, and had contemplated, uh, vocation to the Franciscan order and this actually in a lifelong. Um, connection to the Franciscans late in life, uh, he became a third order Franciscan and took minor orders, uh, and for most of his last 20 years or so, we've been around dressed in a cassock. This like, you know, this was a really, really important part of his identity. Um, he contemplated this himself, actually becoming a priest before he decided against it when he was a, um, a teenager and the sort of superficial fact about his Catholicism that it's been well known. um by generally speaking it's been marginalized until very recently, and there are a number of reasons for this. Um, the first is Issac is already hinted at. Um there a number of things about um, this privid life, Uh, that, you know, sort of make sense. Induced skepticism, as it were, about the sincerity of his Catholic allegiances. So, um, he, there were two main women in Liszt's life. Uh, both of them were married women, uh, that he had long-term affairs with. Uh, the first one, Countess Marie, who was, you know, with him when he wrote, uh, the piece that you just played. Um, he had three illegitimate children with, um, and later on there was another Countess, a Polish Countess, uh, Caroline, uh, Zain Wittgenstein. Um, and, um, This basically had a resurgence of, um, sort of interest in sort of Catholic issues, uh, relatively late in his life, and it was timed after the Vatican denied his second lover, Princess Caroline, an annulment, uh, that would enable them to, um, You know, to, to get married. And so, uh, older, older scholarship has sort of said, you know, it's, it's a bit convenient that he sort of turns to religion only after he couldn't have, you know, the sort of the relationship that he wanted to have. So that's one reason I think that skepticism had existed previously. Um, a second reason is that, um, The things that we know that Liszt said about his Catholicism, at least some of those things, very much focused on thinking about Catholicism as primarily an aesthetic or a political social justice movement. So this is one very famous quote that appears in a lot of biographies that he wrote when he was quite young. It was from an essay entitled, On the Situation of Artists. He wrote, When the altar trembles and totters. Art must leave the sanctuary of the temple and expand into the outside world to seek a stage for its glorious manifestations. Music must recognize God and the people as its living source, must go from one to the other to ennoble, to comfort, to purify man. To bless and praise God. To attain this, the creation of a new music is indispensable. This music, which we would call humanitarian, must be inspired, strong, and effective. Uniting on a colossal scale, theater and church. So it's words like humanitarian, the idea of, uh, music existing in the theater, not just in the church. This kind of thing has been exploited by older scholarship on this is basically saying, you know what, for him, Catholicism was primarily about social change. Um, it was primarily about a political commitment to the world. The dogmas of the faith were less important to him.

Speaker 3 17:43

Might I interject here?

Speaker 2 17:44

Yes.

Speaker 3 17:44

That was actually written when Liszt was 23, so he's a little ridiculous to use that as some sort of a final statement on his use on AIDS. That was right before he left Gary's spurs of toads.

Speaker 2 17:55

Yeah, um, I mean, one of the other things that, uh, people pointed to was Liszt, especially when he was young, was really attached to the writings of, um, a, uh, French, uh, Catholic named Laminet. Félicité Lemonnet, uh, who was condemned actually several times by the Vatican, uh, for what, for views that were considered heterodox, uh, primarily of a sort of excessive political liberal leaning, right, so that sort of fed into this idea. To the point that you just made, I think the reason why that particular quotation gets more press, even though it may not be his final statement, uh, on, on religion, uh, is that, There is a, uh, prevailing sort of secularized, secularizing master narrative in the telling of the story, um, of, uh, Western art and especially Western music in the 19th century, um, the idea being that the arts in the 19th century do get elevated, um, but, you know, they're not Um, It took, they're elevated in status in society, they reflect a certain type of transcendence, but that is a transcendence that substitutes for conventional or traditional religious belief. And so a lot of the pieces, all of the pieces you're going to be playing today, including the one you just played, Um, have been, uh, used by more recent this scholarship to kind of muddy the waters and to complicate that view. The idea that, you know, that this is not religion that's being appropriated maybe for more secularizing ends, but this is a sincere religious commitment that this, uh, that, that this had. Um, and it's sort of something we're thinking about as to the relationship between the arts and, uh, religion in our time today. So, um, just to kind of, with that as a sort of background for the, for the audience, I mean, for these pieces, I mean, are they sort of marginal in the piano repertory? Um, if they are not marginal in the piano repertory, um, are there ways in which when you talk to, say, you know, other pianists who don't come from a, you know, a particular Catholic background, I mean, are they received or understood in a different way, um, than a sort of literal treatment of them as, as sort of religious music? That's

Speaker 3 20:03

a good question. Um, a lot of the lists I play is marginal. The third year of pilgrimage is almost completely marginal, other than the second piece I'm playing, which is the fourth movement, Les Jeux d à la Biodésta. That's actually one of Liszt's most popular pieces, and I would say Spasolizio is fairly popular, um, but his kind of most explicitly sacred music is almost never performed. Um, with my undergraduate group at Columbia, which was an orchestra and choir, we performed one of the movements of this Christus Oratorio, which is a three-hour oratorio, and, um, the movement we did is called the Entry into Jerusalem. I think the last time that it had been performed in New York was in early 2000s when the complete Christus was put on, but, you know, a lot of this music isn't played. In terms of how it's received, as you can see, it's beautiful and well-written piano music, so, I mean, I heard Spossolizio played in Carnegie Hall. and the last two years as part of a complete second year pilgrimage, so it does get played, um, but it's possible to, to just not even think about the religious context as much as written.

Speaker 2 21:12

Just this kind of historical aside, the crazy thing is that even during Liszt's lifetime, the overwhelming majority of his sacred works was not published. So this is sort of the secularizing narrative I was just speaking about is not just a post-facto issue, but has existed even during his lifetime. We come back to that a bit later on. Um, maybe as a kind of final topic to kind of bring up, just to lead into the next section of the, of the, of the program. Um, One of the things that I was kind of reviewing as I was preparing for today was sort of some of the recent scholarly literature on sacred music and, and, and religion and art in the 19th century, uh, in, in my field of musicology. Uh, and there's a really wonderful scholar named James Garrett, who is at, I think, the University of Manchester in, in, in the UK. And, um, one of the, uh, one of his writings that I use often in my undergraduate teaching, um, speaks of three ways of thinking about the relationship between art and religion. Um, in the 19th century. So one way to think about art is sort of what might be called strict religious art or music. So, um, art in the service of the church, directly in the service of the church. So in its purest form, liturgical music is one way to think about the relationship between art and religion. Another possibility is art as complementary and the third is art as replacing religion, which has been the sort of dominant model in a certain type of historical narrative. So obviously it seems here that that third category doesn't apply, right? Because these are very explicit Catholic references that are being made in this music. But... What about those first two categories? So, you know, sort of straight sacred music and the traditional understanding, you know, like the surgical music would be, um, or art that is somehow not quite there, but something else that is complimentary or that goes alongside religion, but not in that, but that does not entirely sort of, it's not entirely opposed to it. These pieces, what, how do they fit into that? I

Speaker 3 23:20

would say, for most of his life, Liszt was, um, interested in the first two categories you mentioned, and probably living mostly in the second category. I think he's all fallen into the second category, I mean, none of this music would fit into The mass, for example, um, it wouldn't be used liturgically. He did in, in the essay that you mentioned, which he wrote when he was 23, I think he had seven or eight points, um, things that he wanted artists to be thinking about and changing in the society at this time in Paris. And the third point was he wanted a revitalization of sacred music. Um, he wanted composers to be writing more seriously for the church and not just, you know, we have our body of music that we use and let's just keep recycling that. But. With the exception of some choral music, he mostly was writing, as he said, music or art that's complementary to religion.

Speaker 2 24:17

Do you have thoughts about maybe then, in a more secular age, uh, that we live in now, whether this kind of music, because it occupies this in-between type space, Therefore has a certain potential maybe for sharing, uh, a message of Catholic belief or Catholic values in a sort of non-church space.

Speaker 3 24:43

Um,

Speaker 2 24:44

and how, you know, if you thought about that and, and your own role as a, as a, as a Catholic Candidate, as somebody working as a Catholic musician and in, in, in today's, uh, environment.

Speaker 3 24:53

Mm-hmm. I mean, music can't exactly impart dogma, but, um, I'd say, to you, I believe all beauty comes from the same source, which is God. And music like this, which at least to some degree acknowledges that, whether it be through the titles, or, um, through inscriptions that are placed inside the piece, in the case of Legio Dolla Vella Testa, which we'll talk about later, or even before the piece begins, I would like to think it gets people thinking. Um, A pretty famous example of that is a piece I'm playing right now back at school, which is Messianic Quartet of the End of Time. The two most famous movements of that beautiful quartet are, um, Praise to the Immortality of Jesus and Praise to the Eternity of Jesus. And these are pieces that people play all the time, um, And, you know, it's written right on the score, so I like to think on some level there's a kind of credentialization going on, in the best sense of the word.

Speaker 2 25:53

So it's, um, time for us to sort of move on. What I'm gonna, uh, ask Isaac to do just for a few minutes is maybe talk a little bit about the, the, I guess the three movements that he's gonna play next, uh, from this third, uh, collection of the, uh, years of pilgrimage. Um, but I want to alert the audience, uh, to the fact that the next sort of talking element of the program, uh, after Isaac plays these wonderful movements for us is just, it's your time. So you will have a chance to ask questions during our next sort of the next section of the conversation. But before you play those, those three movements, tell us a little bit about them. Um, and, uh, we'll go from there. Alright,

Speaker 3 26:30

so the next three pieces are from one of my favorite cycles ever written by any composer, which is Liszt's Third Year of Pilgrimage. You're going to hear a very different composer, um, almost 30 years separate the writing of the first two volumes of the Years of Pilgrimage. And by this point, List had been and would continue until his death to struggle with depression. Um, he was living alone in a monastery near Rome, um, and had lost two of the three illegitimate children that Nick referred to, um, in their early 20s, and was just totally bereft and actually requested to live in a kind of Spartan monastic cell with just a keyboard. Um, one of the things I love about Secret or secret inspired music is that he doesn't shy away from the darkness and violence that we see in life and that is also an intimate part of the Christian faith and just thinking about the perspection because it's easy to imagine what what makes Sacred music sound like, well, maybe you think something like Spasolizio, which is very flowery, a kind of perfumed, just beautiful piece that you can let wash over you, but you're gonna hear in the first piece, violence, um,

Speaker 10 27:49

to my ears, anger,

Speaker 3 27:51

um, And at the same time, bleakness, it doesn't really offer any sense of hope. You might think, well, surely if it's a Catholic composer, there would be some sort of respite, but not, not in the first movement, which by the way is a threnody, which is another word for elegy, or I looked up recently, more specifically, a wailing psalmy. So it's supposed to be, you know, something outside of your normal conversational tone. It's grief-stricken, and respite is sort of given to the listener in the fourth movement. You actually, if you're listening to the whole cycle, you have to make it through another frenzy. He writes two in a row, um, to the cypresses of the Villa d the cypress imagery that's associated with death. Then we have Les Jeux d a la Villa d which I've already told you is one of Les' most popular pieces. And this one's the Fountains of the Village of the East. It's often, I would say, co-authored by music historians as, um, sort of an antecedent to the Impressionist movement in France. So, did we see Ravel? Ravel wrote a piece called Les Jeux d or simply Jeux d Fountains. Which is, uh, clearly inspired by this piece, but what Liszt accomplishes, both in the music and in the inscription that he places from the Gospel of John, is, uh, he takes it from this kind of impressionistic, physical sense in which the water's created in flurries of notes, and, um, And brings it into the, the theological fountain of life, which is Jesus, um, the gospel quote is when Jesus is talking to a Samaritan woman, talking about the water at the well, he says, and him in this context just refers to a person, but the water that I shall give him shall be coming him a well of water screaming up into eternal life.

Speaker 2 29:41

And that's a quote that Liss actually wrote into the score at a specific moment, isn't it? And

Speaker 3 29:48

that moment. Marks the turn from this kind of fragile, beautiful, um, sort of quasi impressionistic world into something much larger and the opening I don't really want to demonstrate this one because I don't want to give it away, but the opening figures, if you remember, in the second of the three pieces of play, which are soft and kind of sequential, meaning they're just repeated at higher pitch levels, comes back in the climax of the piece, just covering the whole stand of the keyboard. It's very moving, and to me that's, you know, fountains. But the water that I shall give to him is that we come in and develop our spring up as we internalize it. I

Speaker 2 30:26

just wanted to add with that, with that second of those three pieces you're about to play with that biblical quote, right? So Liz actually wrote a biblical quote right into the score. Um, but it's important to remember, and I hope this will be followed up a conversation later on. I mean, ostensibly, these are pieces he's responding, uh, that are written in response to him visiting an aristocratic villa in Tivoli. This is the, the, the, the, the, the, the Deste family were very, very wealthy. I think they were Dukes of Ferrara or something. And, um, So it's interesting, this interplay of the secular and the sacred that I think maybe can serve, uh, come sort of topic of conversation later on.

Speaker 3 31:01

Mm-hmm, very much so. And then the, the third piece of this trilogy I'll play, Sursum Corda, um, comes from the words in my ass, Lift Up Your Hearts. And, um, it's not only the last piece of the set of seven pieces on the third year of pilgrimage, but it's, it's the last movement of all the years of pilgrimage. Um, it's one of my favorite pieces by Liszt. And the sort of music theory. Religious interpretation hi-hat, that bass. That, if you notice while you're listening, the bass doesn't really change in this movement. Um, maybe this I will if I... Should I hold on to the mic? The movement opens with this very short melody. And at that point, once the bass reaches E, the piece is in E major, it just stays there the whole time. While the same melody is repeated in the right hand increasingly violently, chromatically, and disturbingly. It's one of his most harmonically dissonant pieces that he ever wrote at any period of his life. But the paradox, which is so mooting to me, is that you have this tonic in the left hand, tonic being the note that all notes eventually either will or want to come back to in a piece of music, and we threaten it. You know, in this style. And for me, I just can't help but identify the tonic with God. And so, to me, the message of Sursum Corda is not only mess up your hearts, but God is there the whole time, even though life is silent, even though let's have major losses in this life. Um, you have the distance completely coexisting with the consonants of the tonic and the bass. And eventually, um, as we all cope as Christians, the, the distance goes away and it just ends in E major. It's, it's just an amazing, amazing and also fairly short work.

Speaker 6 33:02

So I think we're done talking for now. Uh, we'll be back.

Speaker 10 50:25

And time is out open for the audience. I'm going to ask you to keep your hand raised. You like to ask the question and I'll come around to you and pass it. Mike.

Speaker 5 50:38

That was amazing. That was

Speaker 8 50:42

amazing. Thank you. Um, I have so many questions actually.

Speaker 5 50:50

Okay. The only has to, um, do you compose yourself? And, um,

Speaker 8 51:01

do you recommend any other, okay, sorry, um, do you compose yourself, do you recommend any other contemporary composers, and, um, where can they see tomorrow for a visit?

Speaker 3 51:16

I don't compose. I'm highly interested in it, and I have thought for years that all musicians should be doing this, but there's time to come an increasing divide between performers and composers. In my opinion, partially because the standard that's expected of performance has just become incredibly high, so it's really hard to, even some pianists, um, like, if Annie Kissan and Dimitri Ufanov are two great Russian pianists, they both have compositional ability and have done a little bit, but they're just performing so much, it gets hard to geek a bit both. I will actually say about this, List himself. He was kind of the first incredibly famous pop culture figure in history. Um, and he retired at age of 35. He turned his back on performance. He gave his last piano recital when he was 35 years old so that he could focus on composition, which he did for the rest of his life and teaching as well. Um, so, yeah, I'm not a composer. I, I feel like I should be and, and, and I'm always encouraging my friends to start music and one day I will. Whom can I recommend? Are you thinking specifically contemporary, like, living composers?

Speaker 7 52:24

Yes. Okay, well, I'll give a shout out to my friend from Juilliard, Jacob Baranek, who is a recent Catholic convert

Speaker 3 52:31

who's getting married in January and writes amazing contemporary music that's, I think, fairly accessible. Um, I just performed his song, What is God, What is Man? Uh, in Czech, I came over to the Czech for it. Um, yeah, Jacob Baranek, B-E-R-A-N-E-K. It

Speaker 2 52:55

would be remiss of me, uh, to have you leave this event and not, uh, be aware of, uh, a few further details about what, um, Isaac just mentioned about this stature when he was a famous virtuoso pianist. Um, he was like a pop culture figure in this, um, and, uh, try not to get into too many inappropriate details, but, uh, when he toured around Europe, um, critics called it listomania. This was a term that Heinrich Heine, a famous German poet, came up with. Um, women would try to cut his hair while he was performing to save it. Um, they would collect the dregs of his coffee after he had drunk it. Um, and so it's that kind of thing, which is an antecedent of some of the more idolatrous aspects, maybe, of popular culture that we see today with musicians. Um, to know that and then to know that he had this deep faith, if not for his whole life, then definitely towards the end of his life. It's a wonderful kind of counterpoise against that image.

Speaker 10 53:59

We have a question right here. Yeah. Thank you, Percival. Oops. Yeah,

Speaker 9 54:04

thank you for that performance. It was just a treat to hear and so, uh, powerfully interpreted, I thought. Um, yeah, kind of on that question of his biography, he starts off as, like, Justin Bieber, and he's like a playboy, then he has this conversion, and he writes this, Really beautiful music, which is a lot of it full of anguish, like you say, and I, I feel that to be very beautiful, but there's kind of like this presence of the Holy Spirit that's floating through all of the anguish and then in the last year of his life, the last couple of years of his life, his last remaining daughter kind of abandons him. He said he's depressed and his music gets really atonal, like people start pointing ahead towards Schoenberg and things like that. And it seems from my limited knowledge, like, the depression comes to dominate, um, and it just gets really miserable. Um, I wonder if you see any kind of perseverance of hope or of that kind of element of grace that comes, that follows, and even all that pain of so clandestine. Thank you.

Speaker 2 55:14

If you want to take it. Yeah,

Speaker 3 55:15

I would take this question. What a great question. I wish I could give a more emphatic, yes, I do see hope, but really late list is some of the bleakest, um, music. I mean, I chose three movements that could kind of work in performance, but actually a bunch of the other movements from that set of pieces. You can't even really hold an audience with them. There's just so few notes on the page sometimes. Um, I would call him to some exceptions. It's not his latest work, but he has the Christmas tree suite. I think it's a Weihnachtsbaum in German. That has some really sort of consoling music. Um, and, even movements, I chose not to play it because it's so sparse, but the first movement of the third year of pilgrimage, Angela's Prayer to the Guardian Angel, um, has this kind of, it's this kind of move. So

Speaker 7 56:30

it's not all violence and doing movements,

Speaker 3 56:33

man. Um, but I wanted to address another thing that was kind of implicit in your question, how he became pushing towards atonality, and even at least in one piece explicitly atonal, he wrote about etel sans tonalité. Um, it's a little bit of a misconception that Liszt started doing this when he was older, because one of his early Eden, um, sort of sacred pieces, Which he called Poetic and Religious Harmonies, which then became the basis of his much longer cycle of the singing. I think he wrote when he was 19 or 20, and that's extremely chromatic. So he was really, from his teenage foot on, innovating musically in astonishing ways that is still being recognized more and more today. Hi,

Speaker 10 57:17

I loved your interpretation. It was very insightful and very intelligent. And I think especially in the romantic era of classical music, there's a lot of, um, there's a widespread variation in terms of how a performer brings themselves to a performance. So thank you for that. And something I wanted to ask you was that, Um, you know, in performing these pieces, it sounds like you've, you've been doing this kind of repertoire for a while. How has your own faith and your own spiritual experience kind of impacted and molded your interpretation of some of these pieces, especially as you've learned more about Liszt's personal life?

Speaker 3 57:52

Um, from an interpretive standpoint, I don't think my being Catholic really leads me to make that many decisions musically. Possibly with the exception of something I referred to in certain chorda, which is a lot of people don't bring out the bass much because it doesn't change, and a good rule of thumb for musical performance is you want to bring out less change in voices that are moving as opposed to voices that are remaining static. So I guess in my own theological interpretation, I think the bass is kind of the point of the piece. But, um, it doesn't really come to bear so much on my playing. What I will say is that music like this, just. The divide between your professional life, performing, and personal life is just completely

Speaker 7 58:33

erased,

Speaker 3 58:34

which I think is a beautiful thing. Because sometimes with repertoire play, it just feels like, almost how we don't want to be in church, right? We go to church, and we're Christians, and then we leave church and it's back to normal life. Um, Liszt didn't want that for his music, and so, if you are practicing the faith, um, it just goes everywhere with you. Um, I'm gonna play, uh, the Ave Maria from the Armée Gaultier-Garantieuse to conclude, and I can't say Hail Mary without thinking of that, um, even if I'm not in a practice room or, or, or even wasn't thinking about music. Um, so yeah, the, the personal life and the music does start to become more and more like a composer, it's the same faith as, you know. Uh,

Speaker 7 59:13

so real quick, just returning to, uh, the end of his life, sort of the depression that consumed him, more or less. I don't want to say he sued him, because I don't know him that's, sorry,

Speaker 9 59:22

where are you?

Speaker 7 59:22

Oh, right here. Sorry. Just the voice in the ether. Um, uh, I think back to Francisco de Goya, the Spanish painter from the early 19th century and, and how his paintings turned very bleak and very violent. I think of, uh, what is it, um, um, satyr devouring his, his sons or his children, um, and how, you know, violent, if you go that piece, uh, by Goya. Um, do you think maybe he was consumed by a sort of similar depresses manic, um, tendency, if not, and to what degree if, if that was so? Um,

Speaker 3 1:00:03

I'm not sure about manic, but yes, depressive. Um, there's a quote from Lisk where he says the only reason he hasn't committed suicide is because he believes that the commandment thou shalt not kill a higher substance of yourself. So, yeah. Um, is there more to say?

Speaker 7 1:00:19

I mean, I don't think there was any more beyond that, I think. Just

Speaker 2 1:00:24

really quickly, I mean, uh, I've read in several major Lisks. biographies, uh, that do take his religion seriously, sort of more recent writings on it, that the religion is important because it's the one thing that rescues him from the kind of deep pessimism that he expressed some sympathy for in sort of non-religious romantic artists. So that does put a really interesting angle on, on, on that story.

Speaker 3 1:00:52

Yes, I'll also add Liss throughout his life was an idealist. One of his symphonic poems is called The Ideals. And the essay that we talked about that he wrote when he was 23 is completely idealistic. All eight points are things that can't really be realized. One of them has been, he wants music to be more accessible to people. Now if I'm SLP, you can get any piece on your tablet if you aren't. So we did that one, but most of them haven't been accomplished yet. So, um, depression and idealism, I don't know, can they coexist into, like, Western Bacchanus?

Speaker 10 1:01:21

Right over here, I think this is the last question, right here. Uh, probably, yeah.

Speaker 11 1:01:25

I'm just wondering, what sparked your love of Liszt? Like, why have you devoted so much time, so much of your life to knowing about him, to playing his music? Um, yeah.

Speaker 3 1:01:37

Another great question. Um, I discovered his music when I was really young, and the best way I can answer your question is just to say that it never really felt like I had to learn his language, um, as opposed to Beethoven. I just wasn't really onto Beethoven for a while, now I love him, and I think he's one of the greatest composers ever. Sort of the same thing with Bach, um, some composers I've been attracted to and then I've moved over the years, I lose interest. But for Liszt, even some of his bleak stuff when I found that I was maybe 12 years old, it just somehow felt like it was something that was there. I don't know if you're aware of the strain of thought in composers, but there are quite a number of them that feel music is discovered, not so much composed. In the same way that great scientists might think, or mathematicians that they're discovering laws of the universe. Um, I know Osiris Creon felt that way, a Russian composer. I know Stravinsky felt that way. And, I sort of think it's true, that this music is there, and the composers somehow access it. So, yeah, it never felt foreign to me, I just kept... Listening to more and more, and I just found that Liszt's sacred music, or sacred inspired music, was much more beautiful and much more interesting than a lot of the pieces by Liszt that people play. If you go to Juilliard, everyone's doing the Transcendental Etudes, which are incredible works from a mechanical perspective as piano pieces, but they're just not that interesting, or the Hungarian Rhapsodies, which were interesting at the time, maybe so are for their nationalism, using Hungarian folk

Speaker 7 1:03:10

music.

Speaker 3 1:03:10

Transcription by ESO. Translation by

Speaker 7 1:03:10

Um, but in terms of

Final Performance and Closing Remarks

Speaker 3 1:03:12

beauty,

Speaker 7 1:03:13

I just think his Sacred and Sorrowful News piece is

Speaker 3 1:03:15

very sad.

Speaker 2 1:03:19

So

Speaker 7 1:03:19

in the interest of time,

Speaker 2 1:03:20

I think we're going to move to the last piece in the program, which is this Ave Maria from a larger collection called the Armonico-Articular Issues. If you want to tell us a little bit about it, um, and then we'll talk about a couple of things and then we'll have you play.

Speaker 3 1:03:36

So, the Poetic and Religious Harmonies are a set of ten pieces, totaling about an hour and a half. And... Some of them are more performative than others. Um, I will say this one, the Second Marnia Abimeria, really is not a concert piece. Um, and that's kind of why I wanted to end the program with it, because as I told you, List sort of turned his back on the concert hall and The music that he wrote, really, so much of it is just so inward-looking, um, and this piece is of particular interest because not only does he write some kind of description, like di legio della bella desta, but he actually, um, writes out the whole Latin prayer, Ave Maria, over the musical notation. So while you're playing each pitch, there'll be a syllable over just like when you're singing. In fact, this was originally a choral piece that he, a year later, transcribed for piano and also moved up a half step for some reason from A major to B flat major. Um, so we were thinking of hopefully projecting the image of the, uh, text over the music for you, but hopefully if I can communicate it with the way I play, you'll hear that the prosody of the prairie in latin matches a lot of the, the musical lines. Um, yeah, and I'll just share because Les taught a lot of masterclasses and lessons throughout his life, especially from his middle years onwards. And, um, the first piece from the set was called Invocation, and was one of the more extroverted movements of the set. And even that movement, when

Speaker 10 1:05:12

less, um, when people played it for less, you would say

Speaker 3 1:05:15

this really isn't meant for Griffons,

Speaker 10 1:05:16

this is just for your own

Speaker 3 1:05:17

self, privately, to, to be played. So if you felt that way about the rather extroverted opening movement, And I certainly think he meant this piece to the performers, um, solace and gratification versus, um, some of the public discourse.

Speaker 2 1:05:32

I mean, I think that's a really provocative thing to think about a piece like this. So, the words of those, or the words of the audience were written into the score. You as an audience member, have we not told you that? You can't know it. Right? Which means that he's thinking about music very against... That sort of virtuoso celebrity superstar image that I was telling you about a few moments ago, right? This is no longer music as this kind of spectator sport, right? The way that kind of music became in the 19th century that we still kind of often have today. You're in the audience, we're up here, right? But the act of music is, is a more private one and it is explicitly a devotional one. Um, just to end on one complicating note. Um, I mentioned in our first segment that a lot of this music, uh, that was sacred inspired or sacred, actual sacred music with text was not published, was actually refused publication during his life. Some of the, uh, people who refused to publish it were Catholic publishers. And one of the reasons for this was that there was, uh, something called the Sicilian movement, especially in Germany, uh, in the late 19th century, uh, that in reaction to sort of anti-religious forces in society, um, adopted a kind of bunker mentality. Uh, about sacred music. Um, the culminating event was in 1903. There was a papal motu proprio that decreed that only Gregorian chant and unaccompanied renaissance polyphony would be would be permitted. And so this was actually kind of annoyed because he was writing a type of devotional music that didn't fit into the traditional work of the papal motus. Either of these binaries, right, either a situation of like strict sacred music for the liturgy, um, or music that was just, you know, kind of exploiting maybe religious images for secular ends. And so that I think this kind of piece is like the most crystal clear example of what this kind of thing could be. All right, I think we're almost out of time, so we'll finish off with this piece. Thank you so much for your attention.

1:07:24

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