Classical Music | Piano Music

Recorded on 04/19/2006, uploaded on 02/05/2009

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 Orage (“Storm”), the fifth piece in the cycle, with lines from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, a lengthy narrative poem which provided literary reference for many of the pieces of Première année: Suisse:

But where of ye, O tempests! is the goal?
   Are ye like those within the human breast?
Or do ye find at length, like eagles, some high nest?

Cast in C minor, a key already strongly associated with the stormy and fiery works of Beethoven, Liszt’s reflection of a tempest is a bravura display of octaves and thunderous chords. Its principal theme, marked Presto furioso, has a wild majesty about it as it descends through the tonic triad and clashes on an appoggiatura a halftone below the final note. Underneath, the bass rumbles in quickly ascending octaves emphasized as well with the halftone appoggiatura. Essentially shaped in a ternary design, the middle episode does not introduce an entirely new theme but only a variation of the one already heard. Rhythmically, the theme is compressed adding a greater fury to the raging tempest. Following a cadenza, in which the theme is heard in the low register of the piano underneath sweeping arpeggios, a recapitulation of the theme’s initial statement and a final furious cadenza of octaves in both hands leads to the piece’s thunderous and violent close.      Joseph DuBose

Orage (Storm) from Book I Années de Pèlerinage: Suisse               Franz Liszt

Orage is a virtuoso work which conveys, with crashing chords, swirling arpeggios and octave bravura, the drama and violence of an alpine storm.      Ashley Wass

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.