Années de pèlerinage

The suites

Première année: Suisse

1. Chapelle de Guillaume Tell in C major – For this depiction of the Swiss struggle for liberation Liszt chooses a motto from Schiller as caption, "All for one – one for all." A noble passage marked lento opens the piece, followed by the main melody of the freedom fighters. A horn call rouses the troops, echoes down the valleys, and mixes with the sound of the heroic struggle.
2. Au lac de Wallenstadt in A major – Liszt's caption is 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." In her Mémoires, Liszt's mistress and traveling companion of the time, Marie d'Agoult, recalls their time by Lake Wallenstadt, writing, "Franz wrote for me there a melancholy harmony, imitative of the sigh of the waves and the cadence of oars, which I have never been able to hear without weeping."
3. Pastorale in E major –
4. Au bord d'une source in A major – Liszt's caption is from Schiller: “In the whispering coolness begins young nature’s play.”
5. Orage in C minor – Liszt's caption is again from Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage : "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?"
6. Vallée d'Obermann in E minor – Inspired by Étienne Pivert de Senancour's novel of the same title, set in Switzerland, with a hero overwhelmed and confused by nature, suffering from ennui and longing, finally concluding that only our feelings are true. The captions include one from Byron's succeeding canto 97, and two from Senancour's Obermann, which include the crucial questions, “What do I want? Who am I? What do I ask of nature?"
7. Eglogue in A major – Liszt's caption is from the next canto of the Pilgrimage: "The morn is up again, the dewy morn, / With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom, / Laughing the clouds away with playful scorn, / And living as if earth contained no tomb!"
8. Le mal du pays in E minor –
9. Les cloches de Genève: Nocturne in B major – Liszt's caption is from stanza 72, earlier in the Byron's Pilgrimage: “I live not in myself, but I become / Portion of that around me”.

   Deuxième année: Italie

1. Sposalizio in E major
2. Il penseroso in C minor
3. Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa in A major
4. Sonetto 47 del Petrarca in D major
5. Sonetto 104 del Petrarca in E major
6. Sonetto 123 del Petrarca in A major
7. Après une lecture de Dante: Fantasia Quasi Sonata in D minor

• Venezia e Napoli. Composed in 1859 as a partial revision of an earlier set with the same name composed around 1840. Published in 1861 as a supplement to the Second Year

1. Gondoliera in F major – Based on the song "La biondina in gondoletta" by Giovanni Battista Peruchini.
2. Canzone in E minor – Based on the gondolier's song "Nessun maggior dolore" from Rossini's Otello.
3. Tarantella in G minor – Uses themes by Guillaume-Louis Cottrau, 1797-1847.

   Troisième année

1. Angélus! Prière aux anges gardiens in E major – dedicated to Daniela von Bülow, Liszt's granddaughter, first daughter of Hans von Bülow and Cosima Liszt and wife of art historian Henry Thode. It was written for both melodeon, piano, or an instrument that combines both, for Liszt wrote "piano-melodium" on his manuscript
2. Aux cyprès de la Villa d'Este I: Thrénodie in G minor
3. Aux cyprès de la Villa d'Este II: Thrénodie in E minor – The Villa d'Este described in these two threnodies is in Tivoli, near Rome. It is famous for its beautiful cypresses and fountains
4. Les jeux d'eaux à la Villa d'Este in F major – Over the music, Liszt placed the inscription, "Sed aqua quam ego dabo ei, fiet in eo fons aquae salientis in vitam aeternam"
5. Sunt lacrymae rerum/En mode hongrois in A minor – Dedicated to Hans von Bülow.
6. Marche funèbre, En mémoire de Maximilian I, Empereur du Mexique in F minor
7. Sursum corda in E major

   Recordings

Video

• Alfred Brendel DVD

  Score

In Literature