‘Petrarch's Sonnets’ by Liszt

• Authors: Wojciech Nowik
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

The article ‘Petrarch’s Sonnets’ by Liszt revolves around the phenomenon of transformation, which dominated F. Liszt’s works. His impressive composing achievements made Liszt an unequalled author of all types of elaborations, paraphrases, adaptations, transcripts of both his own and other composer’s works, representing various styles and epochs. What is more, the transformation techniques employed by Liszt, different from the commonly applied evolutionary ones, coupled with extended tonality and harmony as well as new textures, resulted in an extremely broad scale of expression and subtly diverse expressive effects. Three of Petrarch’s Sonnets from the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta collection are dedicated to Laura and represent this article’s major area of interest. The Hungarian composer worked on them three times: twice he composed them as songs and once as a piano triptych included in the Années de Pèlerinage. Dèuxieme Année: Italie series. His interpretation of the Sonnets, as well as the remaining works in the series, was inspired by the art of the old Italian masters married with the Romantic idea of correspondence des artes. While it is a part of artistic tradition to turn poetic works into songs (resulting in the vocal lyrics so typical of Romanticism), adding a musical dimension to a sonnet, a piece of poetry with a specific organisation of its content, a unique form and verse discipline, seems risky. It is extremely difficult to successfully transfer equivalent themes and structures onto a different medium i.e. piano music. By turning to Petrarch’s Sonnets, Liszt created congenial palimpsests, reflecting the syntactical and formal rudiments of the verse but, first and foremost, managing to portray Laura in new incarnations, subtly changing in the eternal search for the ideal of femininity, the so-called “Ewig-weibliche”. Especially in the piano version, Liszt seems to have accomplished the esoteric subtlety of the “Sprache über Sprache” available to and understood solely by poets and those in the know.

Keywords

PL

Franz Liszt; Années de Pèlerinage; Dèuxieme Année - Italie; piano music; Sonetto 47 del Petrarca; Sonetto 104 del Petrarca; Sonetto 123 del Petrarca

• Publisher: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
• Journal: Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
• Year: 2014
• Issue: 13
• Pages: 43-56

Dates

published

2018-10-17

Contributors

author

Wojciech Nowik

• Historian, musicologist, music theorist [Professor at Fryderyk Chopin Music University, Dr hab., Head of Chair of Music Theory]. Interests: chopinology, history of music 18th- and 19th- centuries, theory of music 19th- and 20thcenturies. Originator and organiser of the international scientific-artistic conferences: Topos narodowy w muzyce polskiej [‘The national topos in Polish music’] (2006,2007, 2009), organiser of international Chopin conferences: Dzieło Chopina jako źródło inspiracji wykonawczych [ Chopin’s oeuvre as a source of inspiring performance’], (1999), Fryderyk Chopin - dwa wieki fascynacji [‘Fryderyk Chopin - two centuries of fascination ] (2010), co-organiser of the 2nd and 3rd International Chopin Congresses (1999, 2010). Author of more than a hundred works published in Poland and abroad on such topics as the creative process, Chopin’s works and manuscripts, the problems of tonality, syntax, form, structure and expression in the works of the romantics and of twentieth-century artists.