Franz Liszt - De profundis, S121a
Piano: Goran Filipec
Orchestra: Kodály Philharmonic
Conductor: Imre Kollár
On 14 January 1835 Liszt wrote to the Abbé de Lammenais, telling him that he was the dedicatee of a ‘little work’-an instrumental De Profundis, based on a plainsong which they both knew, and which he would send to the Abbé. Liszt himself was about to be ‘away for two months’, for which read much longer. Marie d’Agoult would be pregnant with their first daughter by the end of March 1835 (Blandine was born in December of that year) and events had conspired to remove Liszt (probably without much fuss on his part) some months previously from his voluntary retreat at Lammenais’s home at La Chesnaie. As Iwo and Pamela Zaìuski have written: ‘He would emerge after a spell of religious fervour to embrace worldly passions, and his need for solitude would give way to a need for lively-minded company. His impatience with humanity alternated with feelings of love for his fellow man.’ His particular need for Marie, however, has probably cost us an absolutely correct finished copy of Liszt’s largest concertante piece. The manuscript in Weimar which bears a dedication to Lammenais (we doubt that there was a fair copy made to send to Lammenais) is all but finished, but like many similar Liszt manuscripts, the very end awaits its final form, and may have done so until Liszt tried the work out in public, which he never did. He moved on, and never revived his interest in the work, even though the De Profundis plainsong features in his work as late as the early 1850s. We are indebted to Jay Rosenblatt for making the work performable, and for this recording one or two very minor alternative readings are employed and a short coda recalling the opening of the plainsong has been added. (The Rosenblatt score and parts are available for hire; the two-piano score published by Acs and the score and parts on hire with it are extremely defective, at one point lacking 52 bars of fully-scored music; a version by Michael Maxwell has been recorded, but it takes many liberties with the text, reorchestrates much of the piece, and adds a furious Mephistophelean conclusion.) It can be confidently stated that the orchestration is entirely Liszt’s own. Even more poignant than the use of the word ‘symphonique’, Liszt’s description of the work as being composed for ‘orchestre et piano principal’ tells us how significant the orchestral part is.
The structure of the De Profundis is remarkable, both in itself and for what it presages in Liszt’s symphonic thinking: the piece is a vast sonata movement, containing a slow movement, itself based on the plainsong which does duty for the second subject, and a contrasting scherzo in the form of a polonaise, and ending with a coda based on the slow movement but transformed into a march.
The principal tonality is D minor, but the slow movement is in A flat and the polonaise is in C sharp minor. The difficult question in terms of the serious nature of the work is how to account for the presence of the polonaise. There is certainly nothing in the text of the psalm to account for it. Had the piece come from Liszt’s later life it would be easy to see a tribute to the Princess zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. Here it is more puzzling, but the whole section suggests a capitulation to worldliness not unlike the temptations of Faust by Mephistopheles-Berlioz had introduced Liszt to Gérard de Nerval’s French translation of the first part of Goethe’s play in December, 1830-which are rejected by the sterner stuff of the main material, and which are prefaced by the extremely softened version of the melody advanced by the slow movement-possibly a premonition of Gretchen in the Faust Symphony, and certainly in the same key. It may not be too wide of the mark to see the Faust programme in the whole work-brooding, questioning, prayer, temptation and redemption are all in the piece-alongside the cry of the psalmist for God’s forgiveness:
Out of the deep have I called unto thee, O Lord : Lord, hear my voice.
O let thine ears consider well : the voice of my complaint.
If thou, Lord, wilt be extreme to mark what is done amiss : O Lord, who may abide it?
For there is mercy with thee : therefore shalt thou be feared.
I look for the Lord ; my soul doth wait for him : in his word is my trust.
My soul fleeth unto the Lord : before the morning watch, I say, before the morning watch.
O Israel, trust in the Lord, for with the Lord there is mercy : and with him is plenteous redemption.
And he shall redeem Israel : from all his sins. (Psalm 130 [Vulgate 129])