Classical Music | Tenor

Franz Liszt

Pace non trovo, from from Tre Sonnetti di Petrarca, S. 270a  Play

Seil Kim Tenor
Natalia Katyukova Piano

Recorded on 08/15/2011, uploaded on 09/29/2011

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

During the late 1830s, Franz Liszt and his mistress, Countess Marie d’Agoult, travelled throughout Switzerland and Italy. Inspired by the Swiss countryside and Italian art, Liszt composed many of the pieces that would become the first two volumes of his three-part suite Années de pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”). Alongside these piano works, he composed settings of three Petrarch sonnets for tenor voice and piano. Though youthful works, the three songs already show Liszt’s sensitivity to Petrarch’s verse and that his compositional ability extended beyond the piano. The Petrarch sonnets remained unpublished for nearly a decade, finally appearing in print in 1846. During this time, Liszt made transcriptions of them for piano solo and included them in Deuxième année: Italy, the second suite of Années de pèlerinage. It is in this form that they are primary known today. Like many of his compositions, Liszt later revised the Petrarch sonnets in 1865, transcribing them for lower voice and somewhat darkening their mood.

The 1846 version of Pace non trovo, first in the original triptych, begins with an agitated, chromatic introduction. Petrarch’s verse is the distressed plight of unrequited love, which is adequately established in these opening measures. The first stanza is set in a declamatory, somewhat recitative-like manner, and the anxious and violent emotions of the hapless poet are amplified by the unsettled piano accompaniment. Leading to the second stanza, the piano settles into a reflective and introspective Lento. The melody, announced first by the piano then taken up by the voice, is solemn and melancholy, tinged with poignant augmented triads that recur throughout the accompaniment. The song reaches its climax at the penultimate line of the final stanza and recedes, not back into the introspective music which led up to it, but the agitated music of the beginning as the poet identifies the source of his suffering. The song’s coda, however, turns once again melancholy as the tonic triad alternates with augmented triads and slowly fades into the quiet, punctuated chords of the conclusion.     Joseph DuBose


Steans Music Institute

The Steans Music Institute is the Ravinia Festival's professional studies program for young musicians.