Liszt and Lamartine: Poetic and Religious Harmonies

THE COMPARATIST LISZT AND LAMARTINE: POETIC AND RELIGIOUS HARMONIES Judith L Barban The year 1830 was a banner one for the French poet-poUtician Alphonse de Lamartine. In April he was elected to the prestigious Acad émie Française on the strength of the unparalleled popularity of his first volume ofpoetry, the Méditationspoétiques. Two months Later he published another coUection, the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, which met with equally unprecedented success, for within afew months five editions had sold out. By contrast, in the early 1830s Franz Liszt found himself somewhat in obscurity in Paris, having outgrown his career as a dazzling child prodigy ofthe piano. One newspaper even ran his obituary. The truth is that Franz, at the age of twenty, was eking out a Uving teaching private piano lessons while nursing the wounds of a thwarted love affair, his first. His efforts at original composition were at best fledgling. He discovered the joys ofUterature and became a voracious reader, no doubt finding consolation from the disappointing circumstances of his Ufe at that time. L^etermined to become the leading virtuoso—the Paganini of the piano—he devoted himself to the development of his mind and fingers. He wrote to a friend: "Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand . . . are all around me. I study them, meditate on them, devour them with a fury; besides this, I practise four to five hours of exercises (thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos, repetition of notes, cadenzas, etc.)" (Walker 173-74). Liszt's friend and biographer Joseph d'Ortigue wrote that he had seen Liszt sit motionless for hours with a volume of Lamartine's poetry in his hands (Walker 138). That Liszt had found a kindred spirit in Lamartine is evidenced by the fact that in 1834 hie first of many compositions conceived of literary inspiration (his first truly original composition) bears the title of Lamartine's Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. Years later, during Lamartine's come-back as poUtical champion, Liszt disavowed this first effort to express Lamartine in music, and restructured the Harmonies into a cycle of ten pieces, four of which have Lamartine's titles: "Invocation," "Bénédiction de Dieu dans la soUtude," "Hymne de l'enfant à son réveil" and "Pensées des morts." Two ofthese, "Invocation" and "Bénédiction," are prefaced by direct quotations from the poetry. A fifth piece, "Andante lagrimoso," whose tempo marking Liszt used in Ueu of a title, is also prefaced by a stanza from one of the poems, thus identifying it as obviously correlated (see Addenda). A comparisonofthe score ofthese five musical Harmonies with the text of the five related poems reveals certain common structural patterns which orient the reader's/listener's consciousness toward the same concepts, concrete and abstract. This convergence "does not necessarily depend on formal similarities between works, but on shared ways of 115 LISZTAND LAMARTINE organizingchange andprovoking interpretation," as Lawrence Kramer has explained (24). As one attempts to discover some ofthe techniques by which the poetic expression is treated musically, it is well to bear in mind that both of these artists see themselves as recipients of a divine gift which must be used to benefit mankind. In both there is a surfeit of ego and altruism, and an inclination toward the profane as weU as the sacred, and both artists are virtuosi', poetic devices flow as easily from Lamartine's pen as arpeggios and double octaves flow from Liszt's fingers. Both poet and pianist open with an "Invocation." The first eight alexandrine quatrains—a hymn ofpraise and thanksgiving to God for the "voice" given to birds and beasts, wind and waves, and for the voice given to the poet's own soul—are not included in the music. Nor is the second section ofeight-syllable Unes. However, in this part Lamartine introduces one of the central images of the Harmonies: poetry is the harp or lyre which bears the voice ofthe soul to God: "Harpe qui fait trembler mes doigts/ Sois toujours le cri de mon âme/ A Dieu seul rapporte ma voix." Liszt expresses the idea musically in a series ofroUed chords or arpeggios marked "quasi pizz...