Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 02/08/2007, uploaded on 02/09/2009

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

Franz Liszt spent the late 1830s traveling throughout Switzerland and Italy with his mistress Marie d’Agoult. During his travels and the years immediately following he captured his personal reflections of the Alpine landscapes of Switzerland and the masterworks of Italian Renaissance art in the first two suites of his three-part Années de Pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”), titled Première année: Suisse and Deuxième année: Italie, respectively. A quarter of a century later after the publication of Deuxième année: Italie, Liszt published the third and final installment of Années de Pèlerinage. The final bears only the title of Troisième année, with no reference to a location. Three of its seven pieces, however, draw inspiration from the Villa d’Este, a Renaissance villa in Tivoli outside of Rome, where Liszt performed at the invitation of Cardinal Gustav Adolf Hoholohe.

Liszt depicted the gardens, with their many fountains, pools and water troughs, of Villa d’Este in Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este (“The Fountains of Villa d’Este”), the most popular piece of the final suite. Composed in 1877, the piece looks forward to the Impressionism of Debussy in its aural representation of water and is a remarkable example of Liszt’s use of coloristic effects. In the radiant key of F-sharp major, it opens with brilliant arpeggios of extended chords (ninths and elevenths). Tremolandi, primarily in the upper register of the piano, are used extensively throughout the piece as Liszt depicts the brilliant flow of water throughout the gardens of Villa d’Este. However, in the middle of the piece, Liszt departs momentarily from the pictorial presentation of water to a spiritual one instead. A simple melody emerges, accompanied by sweeping harp-like arpeggios, over which Liszt placed the inscription, “Sed aqua quam ego dabo ei, fiet in eo fons aquae salientis in vitam aeternam” (“But the water that I shall give him shall become in him a well of water springing up into eternal life”). A passage similar to the beginning returns the listener to the Villa d’Este gardens. However, the unadorned chords of the closing once more draw the focus to the mystical element of the middle section.     Joseph DuBose

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Les jeux d’eau à la Villa d’Este from Années de Pèlerinage     Franz Liszt

"Les jeux d'eau à la Villa d'Este" (The Fountain of the Villa d'Este) is one of the 19th century's most brilliant demonstrations of pictorial music, and one of the most virtuosic pieces Liszt ever wrote, without ever putting virtuosity first. It's a true pianistic tone poem, in the mode of the tone poems Richard Strauss would later create for orchestra. Brilliant, rippling figures show us the fountain in sparkling sunshine. We hear brief passages of staccato that suggest bouncing water droplets and dancing jets of water in sunlight. A new thematic variant is presented in the piano's highest register, then the fountain totally opens up with powerful chords and runs that exploit the entire range of the keyboard. You can almost see the colors of the spectrum as the sun shines through the jets of water. Sparkling high notes and rippling bass patterns lead to a subsiding of the waters into a gentle repose.

"Les jeux d'eau à la Villa d'Este" had a powerful influence on later composers, Debussy included. He evokes water sounds in the preludes "La Cathedrale engloutie" and "Ondine."

Notes by Andrea Lamoreaux

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