Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 01/02/2013, uploaded on 06/17/2013

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

In the late 1830s, Franz Liszt, in the company of Marie d’Agoult travelled through Switzerland and Italy. Inspired by the scenes he witnessed throughout Switzerland, Liszt captured his personal reflections in a set of pieces titled Album d’un voyageur, composed during his travels and published later in 1842. Between 1848 and 1854, he returned to Album d’un voyageur, revising the earlier cycle and expanding the cycle to include Èglogue, which had been published separately, and Orage composed in 1855. The revised cycle was rechristened as Première année: Suisse (“First Year: Switzerland”)—the first volume of his three-part Années de Pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”)—and was published in that same year.

Liszt prefaced the Vallée d’Obermann (“Obermann’s Valley”) with captions from two different sources. Like many of the other pieces of Première année, one caption comes from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

Could I embody and unbosom now
That which is most within me,—could I wreak
My thoughts upon expression, and thus throw
Soul—heart—mind—passions—feelings--strong or weak—
All that I would have sought, and all I seek,
Bear, know, feel—and yet breathe—into one word,
And that one word were Lightning, I would speak;
But as it is, I live and die unheard,
With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.

The other two captions come from the 1804 novel Obermann by Étienne Pivert de Senancour, from whence the piece’s title comes, the most important being: “What do I want? Who am I? What do I ask of nature?” Discouraged by his misfortunes, Obermann retreats into the countryside and his reflections become the subject of Liszt’s tone poem. The piece opens with a melancholic theme in E minor, simply descending through the scale but with a poignant syncopation on the first halftone. The unsettling and dejected mood is reflected in the quickly changing tonal centers as the music passes into darker keys—first, G minor then B-flat minor—before the termination of the theme. The middle section of the piece begins with a consoling transformation of the theme in C major. However, it soon turns to a quasi-recitative with dramatic harmonies and a transformation of the theme growing in fervor and resolve. The fervent middle section then leads to final section in E major. Beginning with a similar consoling temperament as the previous C major section, it eventually grows into a radiant declaration of optimism and determination.      Joseph DuBose

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.