Classical Music | Piano Music

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

Musician's or Publisher's Notes

During the latter half of the 1830s, Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult travelled throughout Switzerland and Italy. Liszt had emerged as a capable and original composer, and the scenes he witnessed throughout Switzerland inspired him to capture his personal reflections in tones. The resulting collection of pieces was titled Album d’un voyageur and was published in 1842. A few years later, in 1848, Liszt returned to these pieces revising them until 1854 and adding two more: Èglogue, which had been published separately, and Orage composed in 1855. The revised and expanded cycle was published that same year and rechristened as Première année: Suisse (“First Year: Switzerland”). It became the first installment in a trilogy of suites titled Années de Pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”).

Like most of the pieces of Première année: Suisse, Liszt prefaced the second piece, Au lac de Wallenstadt, with a selection from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage:

Thy contrasted lake
With the wild world I dwell in is a thing
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake
Earth's troubled waters for a purer spring.

Inspired by Lake Walenstadt, one of the largest lakes in Switzerland, Liszt portrays the serene waters he likely gazed on in contemplation and the larger philosophical meaning of his selection from Byron. Set in the placid key of A-flat major, the opening melody stretches out peacefully over an quasi-Impressionistic accompaniment of arpeggios supported by a tonic pedal. As the accompaniment flows between tonic and dominant harmonies like gentle waves on the surface of the lake, the melody rises and falls gracefully—its sounds calling to mind the image of brilliant sunlight reflecting off pristine waters. The central episode of the piece’s ternary form changes to the key of the subdominant. Beginning with a fragment of the principal melody the section ventures into troubled waters. The key shifts quickly and, though the accompaniment pattern remains the same, the tranquil effect of the pedal tone is lost. Yet, with clear E-flats in the upper register, the tonic key is reestablished and the accompaniment gradually returns to the peaceful ebb and flow of the beginning. An embellished return of the melody and a coda then bring the piece to a close.    Joseph DuBose

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Au lac de Wallenstadt, from Années de Pélerinage: Suisse           Franz Liszt

Au lac de Wallenstadt is a miniature masterpiece prefaced by lines from Byron; "Thy contrasted lake with the wild world I dwell in, is a thing which warns me with its stillness, to forsake earth's troubled waters for a purer spring". The work held special significance for Liszt's mistress, the Countess Marie d'Agoult, who wrote "the shores of the lake of Wallenstadt kept us for a long time. Franz wrote for me there a melancholy harmony, imitative of the sigh of the waves and the cadence of the oars, which I have never been able to hear without weeping".     Ashley Wass

Courtesy of International Music Foundation.