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Description
Franz Liszt and the Creation of Années de pèlerinage — Première année: Suisse, S. 160
Franz Liszt was born on October 22, 1811, in Raiding, Hungary, and became the most celebrated pianist of the nineteenth century — a performer whose technical command was so far beyond his contemporaries that he effectively redefined what the instrument was capable of. Beyond the showpieces and paraphrases that made his public reputation, however, Liszt was also a composer of considerable literary and philosophical depth, and the Années de pèlerinage — Years of Pilgrimage — represent his most sustained and ambitious attempt to unite music with landscape, literature, and personal experience. The first volume, Suisse, grew out of his travels through Switzerland in the mid-1830s with the writer Marie d'Agoult, and each of its nine pieces draws directly on the scenery, poetry, and atmosphere of that journey.
The collection moves through a wide range of character and scale. Chapelle de Guillaume Tell opens the set with a broad, hymn-like solemnity, its spacious harmonies evoking the heroic landscape of the Swiss mountains, while Au lac de Wallenstadt is one of the most delicate and atmospheric pieces Liszt ever wrote, its gently lapping figuration in the right hand conjuring the still surface of the lake with quiet precision. Pastorale and Églogue offer moments of folk-like simplicity and pastoral warmth, while Au bord d'une source is a study in shimmering, cascading figuration that captures the play of light on moving water with remarkable vividness. The dramatic center of the collection is Orage — a storm piece of considerable turbulence and pianistic force — while Vallée d'Obermann, the longest and most introspective piece in the set, draws on the Swiss writer Senancour's novel of the same name to explore a mood of vast, searching melancholy that ranges from bare stillness to passages of intense emotional power.
The collection closes with Le mal du pays — a piece whose title translates roughly as homesickness or a longing for one's native land — and the gentle, bell-like Les cloches de Genève, subtitled Nocturne, whose quietly tolling harmonics bring the Swiss journey to a peaceful and reflective close. Together the nine pieces form one of the most cohesive and imaginatively sustained travel journals in all of piano literature — music that is as much about interior experience as outward landscape, and a work that reveals a side of Liszt far removed from the concert hall virtuoso.
Track List:
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Années de pèlerinage, S.160: I. Chapelle de Guillaume Tell - 6:40
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Années de pèlerinage, S.160: II. Au lac de Wallenstadt - 2:56
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Années de pèlerinage, S.160: III. Pastorale - 1:46
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Années de pèlerinage, S.160: IV. Au bord d’une source - 3:54
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Années de pèlerinage, S.160: V. Orage - 4:22
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Années de pèlerinage, S.160: VI. Vallée d’Obermann - 13:58
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Années de pèlerinage, S.160: VII. Églogue - 3:50
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Années de pèlerinage, S.160: VIII. Le mal du pays - 5:46
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Années de pèlerinage, S.160: IX. Les cloches de Genève (Nocturne) - 6:20
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- Total Runtime - 49:32
