Songs (Includes Three songs from Wilhelm Tell & Three Sonnets of Petrarch)

During one of my earliest meetings with Keith Lewis, in an idyllic setting in the south of France, I extolled the songs of Franz Liszt and tried to persuade him that they would ideally suit his voice. At that time he was unaware of them, so I provided him with recordings, confident that he would agree with me. As I write these notes, the venue is the same, Keith has proved me right and, a decade later, Liszt's songs retain all the appeal they have always had for me. Aware of the nooks and crannies which the record industry have scoured to find music to appeal to their buyers, I continue to be amazed how this wonderful music still has not found its due place in the repertoire and is ignored by so many singers.

In 1847, Liszt ended his career as a travelling virtuoso. This move, which astonished the musical world and his many followers, is generally accepted as being as a result of advice given him by the new dominant influence in his life, Princess Caroline Sayn-Wittgenstein. Liszt, then at the peak of his fame, the unchallenged king among pianists but only known as a composer through the works he performed in public, might have resisted this advice but for the fact that he was already a musician of far wider ranging talent than his reputation suggested. He was, above all, a composer, a great one as we now accept, and was becoming increasingly reluctant to let this be overshadowed by his magnetic powers as a performer, and his film-star good looks, which were having an effect on an ever more demanding public. From this time on, settled in Weimar, which he made one of the most important musical centres in Europe, Liszt concentrated on composing, conducting and promoting the works of his contemporaries and teaching.

While this move enabled him to realise his full potential as a composer, it did little to change his reputation. To this day the worldwide public perception of Liszt is as a composer of Romantic music for the piano, the 'greatest pianist of all time' and, with the help of a Hollywood film, the embodiment of the Romantic artist and lover. All true, of course, but only a small part of the total picture of the life of a genius.

One of the many little-known facts of Liszt's achievements as a composer is that he wrote more original music involving the singing voice than he did for the piano. The songs, about 75 in all, are quite a small part of that but, nevertheless, are an important part of his oeuvre. Liszt clearly had a high opinion of them himself, as he later transcribed many of them for solo piano. Among these are the three Petrarch sonnets, well known in their place in the second Année de Pèlerinage, and the three Liebesträume (not recorded here), the third of which is probably the best known of all Liszt's works. Nine of the songs included on this CD were later transcribed for piano.

One of the reasons we still have to make a special plea for Liszt's songs is that they have never been well-received by the 'experts' who have written about them. Often they have been criticised as great poetry set to virtuoso piano accompaniments that are at times wholly inappropriate. There is truth in this: it would be hard to justify the first setting of Goethe's "Der du von dem Himmel bist" which reaches its impassioned climax on the words 'süsser Friede' (sweet peace) and in general gives the singer an impossible task to make sense of the poetry. Yet, if we imagine this song as a purely wordless vocalise, what glorious and inspired music this is. This is not music for dry critical assessment; to appreciate all that these songs have to offer, we must understand Liszt as the arch-Romantic who, like Byron, was an amalgam of all the passions, excesses and human frailties that are intrinsic elements of the Romantic artist. It is both the greatness and the critical failure of his music that its inspiration came from the heart before the mind, often as an almost involuntary outpouring of emotion that retains the indiscipline implicit in such acts of spontaneity.

Liszt himself was aware of his 'faults'. He revised nearly half his songs, sometimes more than once. "Der du von dem Himmel bist", originally composed in 1842, was revised three times, in 1856, 1860 and near the end of his life. While most Liszt scholars agree that the later versions are better settings of the poetry, it may be argued that the only true example of unbridled Romanticism must be the work's first incarnation.
Virgil Pomfret

Ten years ago I met Virgil Pomfret in Provence and after our initial meeting Virgil generously supplied me with the complete recordings of Liszt's songs. When Trust Records approached David Harper and me to record a lieder CD, Liszt seemed the obvious choice. I then called on Virgil to write the accompanying notes. His knowledge and passion for Liszt's repertoire has been a distinctive bonus. I thank him sincerely for his time and generous commitment to this project.
Keith Lewis