Before composing “Harmonies poétiques et religieuses“, Liszt is thirty-five years old and writes to the Grand Duke of Saxe: «The moment has come for me (“midway upon the journey of our life”) to break the chrysalis and to soar my thought across the entire sky».
During the long months of his wanderings, he finds the time to write only one Pater Noster for male choir and organ.
It is the period in which he meets the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, and it is the beginning of a much-longed-for new life in which the princess does nothing but encourage him; within him begins the struggle between the desire for purification and the temptations of a generous nature.
In contact with the princess, the Franciscan (son of a Franciscan seminarian!) was not slow to draw closer again to the essential light of his life. «For my part», he writes to the Countess d’Agoult, «I return more than ever to my starting point, to Christianity. The future of the world lies in this past of its, and ultimate wisdom in the cross. One day I wrote to George Sand that only Christ can free us. Well, that feeling gushed from the deepest part of my heart, not in words but in resigned hopes, in solitary music, similar to the murmur of forests in autumn. This music is not written, it is not sung, but we feel, in our sufferings, that God listens to it...». The first testimony of his rediscovered faith is found in some piano pieces collected in 1852 under the title taken from Lamartine, Harmonies poétiques et religieuses.
HARMONIES POÉTIQUES ET RELIGIEUSES
Six pieces refer to Lamartine: Invocation, Pensée des morts, Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, Hymne de l’enfant à son réveil, Miserere and Cantique d’amour. The others attest to the Christian spirituality of the collection, and Funerailles, the most famous, celebrates three victims of the revolution that tore Hungary apart from 1848 to 1850: Prince Félix Lichnowsky, Count Seleky, and Count Balthyanyi.
Alphonse de Lamartine (1790-1869) French poet. After completing his studies, he comes to Italy staying in Naples, an experience that has a significant weight in his work. Over the years, the tone of his poetry changes, in search of a spiritualism that flows into the “Harmonies poétiques et religieuses” of 1830, meeting the favor of a vast audience. The thematic breadth of the work is much wider and more varied than the previous “Lirica d’amore,” and the presence of poems on religious subjects, some deeply Christian, makes it one of the most significant collections.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_Q6Z3KCG9E&list=PL83B77965989C3C6E
