Liszt's 'Via Crucis,' music that combines both pain and solace concludes what is one of the strangest transitions in the history of music. Deeply conflicted, Liszt's uniquely glittering career as a pianist came to seem superficial and unworthy; little more than an amusement for distinguished society or prompting animated discussion as to whether he had twenty rather than ten fingers among the less distinguished. Retiring from public performance at the age of thirty-five he sought peace and seclusion away from 'the madding crowd' allowing him to immerse himself in his deeply entrenched Catholicism. The dark-hued romanticism of his later years not only led him to look far ahead to musical revolutionary's-- notably Debussy, Bartok and even Schoenberg-- but also to mirror world-weary disillusionment and despair. The titles themselves tell their own story; 'Bagatelle sans tonalite,' 'La lugubre Gondola' 1 and 2, 'Unstern'(literally, unlucky or unstarred). 'Nuages Gris,' 'Schlaflos Frage und Antwort'(sleepless question and answer).Less emphatically, the four 'Valses oubliee' and 'Jadis'(meaning, 'formerly,' from The Christmas Tree Suite) are elusive, bitter-sweet utterances, all of them telling of a darkening of the soul. The Hungarian Rhapsodies Nos 16-19, too, are a far cry in their fraught nature from the earlier and ornate Nos 1-15. The change from the early brio of 'La Campanella; to the 'Angelus' from the third book of the 'Annees de pelerinage' suggests an entirely different approach to the ringing of bells, the former a showman's trump card, the latter an almost distant, other- worldly chime.
All these works were received with incomprehension, as little more than the tired experiments of a senile old man. Liszt's early flamboyance, his 'glanz' or glitter period, had prompted disapproval from many quarters. For Clara Schumann there was 'too much of the tinsel and the drum' It also earned him contempt from Chopin, suspicion from Schumann and resentment from Mendelssohn, angered by Liszt's playful tampering, by his making Mendelssohn's compositions more 'effective.'
Even today Alfred Brendel's eloquent plea on behalf of Liszt's status is exceptional, contradicted by Liszt's compatriot Andras Schiff, also by Ashkenazy and Fou t'song(though both these made an exception with the B minor Sonata). Neither did many of Liszt's contemporaries forget his often-provocative behaviour and his indifference to many people's welfare. His generosity and encouragement to others( to Borodin and Grieg for example) were forgotten in a cloud of resentment and a sense of past injury.
Given such enmity Liszt's faith, a life-long comfort and preoccupation, was severely tested. Living his early life in a cloud of adulation he ended it feeling he had lived too long, was scorned rather than appreciated, his longed-for marriage to the Princess Caroline WIttgenstein forbidden by the very source of his inner strength.
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And so, to the 'Via Crucis.' LIszt was too devout to see himself Christ-like in his own journey and crusifixion, but his end was tragic, his light extinguished in a blaze of Wagner worship. As a final blow, the 'Via Crucis,' composed in Rome and completed at the Villa d'Este between1866 and 1879 a few years before Liszt's death in 1886, was rejected by his publisher as incomprehensible and uncommercial; it remained unperformed until 1929.
Leif Ove Andsnes comments movingly on Liszt's 'service for the souls of the dead,' on music stripped down to bare essentials in avant garde harmonic language. By way of a complimentary early offering he plays the Six Consolations together with the 'Andante Lagrimoso and the MIserere d'apres Palestrina from the 'Harmonies poetiques et religieuses', the former a painfully halting foretaste of the crisis yet to come, the latter taking us full circle back to the chant- like opening of the 'Via Crucis.' Andsnes's performances are deeply sensitive throughout and he is superbly partnered by The Norwegian Soloist's Choir under Grete Pedersen and four soloists. Noone intent on exploring the full range and extent of Liszt's complexity should be without this disc, its dark and unsettling communication crowned by Sony's sound, an ideal rising to a very special occasion.
Bryce Morrison