LISZT: Dante Symphony; Tasso – Kirill Karabits – Audite

by | Feb 21, 2020 | Classical CD Reviews | 0 comments

LISZT: Dante Symphony; Tasso – Lament and Triumph, Symphonic Poem No. 2; Kuenstlerfestzug zur Schillerfeier – Women’s Chorus of the Weimer National Theater/ Youth Choir of the Jena Philharmonic/ Staatskapelle Weimar/ Kirill Karabits – Audite  97.760, 79:02 (2/14/20) [Distr. by Naxos] *****: 

Liszt conceived the Gala Procession for the Schiller Celebrations for 10 November 1859, in tandem with his symphonic poem Der Ideale. A double statue by Ernest Rietschel for both Goethe and Schiller was to have been unveiled in 1857, but Liszt procrastinated so as to make the occasion fit his intent as the prelude for incidental music for a melodrama by Friedrich Halm, Von hundert Jahren, utilizing motifs in the present work.  After a dramatic opening series of chords that resemble Beethoven’s Coriolanus, the festive sounds invoke a solemn occasion. A lovely horn tune, dolce espessivo, finds sensuous harmonization in the harp and strings, not so far from the melodies in “Gretchen” in Eine Faust-Symphonie.  Conductor Karabits provides us the world-premiere recording (14 April 2019).

The Weimar experience in Liszt extends beyond the occasional piece into the 1847 treatment for the (Goethe) celebration of Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), author of Jerusalem Delivered.  Curiously, Goethe provides Liszt his inspiration, though Liszt felt that his true model lay in Lord Byron’s 1817 The Lament of Tasso, which dramatizes the poet’s tragic love for Leonora d’Este and his subsequent seven years’ incarceration in a mad house.  In one extended movement, the music originally was to serve as an overture; the music meant to capture the “Romantic Agony” suffered by “the most unfortunate of poets,” the “genius ill-treated during his life.”  Tasso, in this compressed drama, journeys from fateful Venice to Rome, where his martyred spirit finds apotheosis. The opening, descending melody – which this auditor first noted in a Universal motion picture with Karloff and Lugosi – Liszt had employed in the 1838 Venezia e Napoli, and he subsequently treats the mournful plaint to a series of transformations.  At the Court of Ferrara the (original goldolier) melody becomes a stately minuet, delicate, amorous, and elegant. The music proceeds to inflamed, tormented heights and depths, moving to a heroic victory march that features virtuoso filigree in strings, winds, harp, tympani, and brass.  This inflamed rendition rivals, in its final pages, the immensely powerful recording left some years ago by Bruno Maderna.

As a youthful auditor of Liszt’s 1856 Dante Symphony, I listened to the long-defunct American Decca recording by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Alfred Wallenstein (DL 9670), which in spite of sonic limits, gave me some indication of the work’s terrors and consolations.  More recently, Kurt Masur seemed to have “owned” the work, performing it in Boston and other venues. Again, for Liszt, Byron cast a “divine light” upon Dante with his The Prophecy of Dante.  In 1837, Liszt, traveling throughout Italy, made sketches in his annotated copy of Dante of motifs that would serve his piano piece Apres une lecture du Dante, fantasia quasi sonata and the Dante Symphony, the latter conceived as a stage drama.  Similar to Wagner, Liszt imagined a “total art work” that would include narrator, chorus, contralto, and orchestra, even complemented by paintings by Bonaventura Genelli to be projected om a screen.

Liszt in fact dedicated the score to Wagner, “in steadfastly loyal love.” Wagner reciprocated the affection, calling the score “the soul of Dante’s poem in its purest and most transfigured form.”  From the opening musical incarnation of the Gates of Hell of Inferno, we feel the agonies of musical means, with their grinding sense of Eternity’s remorseless vengeance on those “who cease to fear God.”   Yet a haunted lyricism permeates the score, given to strings, brass, cymbals, and tympani.  As in Tchaikovsky – and Rachmaninoff – Liszt finds the moment of compassion in the Canto describing Francesca of Ravenna, perpetually fused to her illicit lover, Paolo. The tormenting winds of lust temporarily calm so that Dante and Virgil might listen – under the call of Love – to her recollection of that fatal perusal of the legend of Lancelot and Guinevere, when her eyes and those of Paolo met, “and that afternoon we read no more.” Marked Andante amoroso, tempo rubato, the music assumes a tragic, passionate dignity.

The Weimar oboe player takes us to the second part, Purgatorio, where souls burn in cleansing fire that Liszt portrays more as a soothing mist. The music transforms to a chorale that in turn Liszt treats polyphonically.  Those who await eventual salvation must pass through a series of harmonic transformations akin to moments in later Schoenberg that might “literally” assume the Jacob’s ladder” motif of spiritual transition. Recall that Virgil cannot lead Dante to Paradise: his life as a pagan poet forbids him; but more relevant is his embodiment of the power of Reason, which in itself proves insufficient to serve as Faith.  Liszt then conceives Paradiso in the form of a Magnificat, the Virgin Mary’s Throne of Glory.  Strings and a pair of harps create a luminous fabric of sound, the musical equivalent of cherubs’ sings. The children and women’s choruses emerge from “on high,” the music’s deliberately eschewing bass-tone fundamentals. Heavenly voices intone, alternately, Hosanna and Halleluja – Liszt’s own contribution to the Virgin’s text – that rise in pitch.  And so, the music achieves that synoptic, spiritual pose that justifies Dante’s life and mission as a poet of Christendom, who, in the opinion of W.B. Yeats, has never been surpassed as the most visionary of literary talents.

—Gary Lemco




Related Reviews
Logo Pure Pleasure
Logo Crystal Records Sidebar 300 ms
Logo Jazz Detective Deep Digs Animated 01