Liszt: Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne
It seems that Liszt was inspired as early as 1831 to write a piece of music on the theme of Victor Hugo's poem Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne (1829; the French title means "What One Hears on the Mountain"). This poem appears in Hugo's Feuilles d'Automne or "Autumn Leaves". Liszt felt an almost magical attraction to it and an urge to write a piece of music about it. Liszt played his themes for Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein in 1847/8. The French composer César Franck also composed a symphonic poem on the same theme and poem around 1845.
The poem deals with a strange situation, strongly influenced by Romanticism, in which a poet, pathetically bidding farewell to his friends, finds himself on a cliff overlooking the sea. Below him the all-consuming sea, above him infinity. At this height, his inner world reacts to the enormous forces of nature he experiences there and translates them into inner pain and turmoil. The voice of nature and the voice of man come into conflict, with nature reflecting the harmonious ideal and man as the one who disturbs the matter with all his noise. "Why does God allow all this?" is Hugo's question. Perhaps this was also a question that preoccupied Liszt at this time in his life.
[Victor Hugo sur le rocher des Proscrits, vers 1853.]
Liszt's symphonic poem was originally composed in 1848-9, revised in 1850, and completed in 1854. The first version may have been scored by Conradi, but the first known score is by Raff. Eventually, through long practice as conductor of the Weimar court orchestra, Liszt himself became familiar with orchestration and made his own score. When Liszt finally completed the symphonic poem, more than 20 years after the first sketches, he added a third, religious dimension to the music. This is heard in the form of a beautiful chorale in the brass and woodwinds. In his own memoirs, Liszt writes that this idea was inspired by hearing Carthusian monks singing a religious song. The chorale is in the same tradition as the pilgrim choir in Wagner's Tannhäuser. Liszt writes: "The poet hears two voices; one immense, splendid and full of order, raising its joyful hymn of praise to the Lord - the other hollow, full of pain, swollen with weeping, blasphemies and curses. One spoke of nature, the other of humanity! The two voices struggle close to each other, cross each other, melt into each other, until they finally die away in a state of holiness."
This is Liszt's longest symphonic poem. It lasts about 30 minutes. Before 1854, Liszt called this work Méditation symphonique, and later he used the name Bergsymphonie. The chorale melody appears in different orchestrations in the middle and at the end of the composition. The section for the first chorale constantly varies the same theme in rich shades and combinations. The enormous wealth of motifs and themes could be the subject of a study in its own right, and shows, among other things, the great attention Liszt paid to the final work before he considered it ready for publication.
Symphonic Poems