Orpheus

Franz Liszt was a man of exceptional energy. He was active throughout his life as pianist, composer, conductor, and teacher, with constant commitments in France, Germany, Italy, and Hungary. He was also a lifelong reviser of his own music. As such, it is not clear to us over a century past his death which piece he was working on at any given moment. Liszt sketched, drafted, completed, revised, and revised again before many of his works were ever published or performed — and even then, they were often subject to further tinkering. His output of original compositions and transcriptions (of his own and others’ works) was so vast, it is likely that his mind, if not his desk, was always a traffic-jam of pieces in various stages of completion.

The symphonic poem Orpheus is exceptional, then, because it enjoyed a relatively simple birth and was never revised. While Liszt was known for his virtuosity on the piano and for the great brilliance of his compositions, this work presents a total contrast in tone and sensibility. In this work is the contemplative Liszt, absorbed not by his lifelong religious devotions, but by the legacy of Greek culture.

In the printed score, this beautiful work is prefaced by a short essay in which Liszt explains how, as conductor of Weimar’s opera house in the 1850s, he was preparing a performance of Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed Euridice. The “sublime simplicity” of Gluck’s music led him to think of Orpheus as a symbol for the essence of art. Calling to mind an Etruscan vase he had seen at the Louvre in Paris, Liszt pictured “the first poet-musician, draped in a star-studded robe, his brow crowned with a mystically royal bandeau, his lips open to utter divine words and music, and his long, slender fingers energetically plucking the strings of his lyre.” Around the figure of Orpheus on the vase lie the wild beasts he has tamed with the beauty of his singing; all nature is subdued by the power of art. The essay insists that the modern world has much to learn from this artistic vision. In his symphonic poem, Liszt made his point by composing music not in an imagined style from ancient Greece, but in a modern, 19th-century orchestral language.

Liszt’s orchestral music has sometimes been dismissed as being derived from Berlioz or ghosted by his disciple Joachim Raff, but in works such as Orpheus, his mastery of orchestration is both personal and obvious; it is a short step from here to the new soundworld of Wagner’s music dramas.

For this work, the two harps play a crucial role in representing Orpheus’s lyre. The opening sections are scored with the character of chamber music, giving expressive solo entries to the woodwinds. Solo violin and cello also contribute, and the mood remains serene and abstracted until a certain quickening of the pace generates a modest climax for the full orchestra. Calm returns, and the final page has a visionary quality with string and wind chords alternating in celestial harmony.

The work was first performed in February 1854 as the overture to a performance of Gluck’s opera. While Orfeo has its own overture, it is, by common consent, a somewhat bland piece that has little in common with the marvelous music of the opera itself. Liszt would have had no hesitation in substituting his own much more appropriate piece; such shifting and substitution was quite normal in the 19th century.

Later that same year, Liszt’s Orpheus was performed in Weimar as a concert work, and in due course it took its place as “No. 4” in the series of 12 published symphonic poems — composed by Liszt throughout the 1850s as part of his enduring legacy after he had given up concertizing as one of the century’s greatest virtuoso pianists.

— Hugh Macdonald

Hugh Macdonald is Avis H. Blewett Professor Emeritus of Music at Washington University in St. Louis. He has written books on Beethoven, Berlioz, Bizet, and Scriabin, as well as Music in 1853: The Biography of a Year.