Liszt and the French literary avant-garde o f the 1830s

• Authors: Małgorzata Gamrat
• Languages of publication: PL

Abstracts

PL

In France the 1820s and 1830s brought about enormous changes in the perception of literature and art as a whole. Young poets, encouraged by the success and novelty of Méditations poétiques by Alphonse de Lamartine, started seeking new possibilities of expression and ways of breaking with the several-centuries-old tradition. They met with a strong protest from conservative milieu, especially those linked to Académie française, and this made them fight for a new paradigm in literature. They eagerly experimented with language as sound (Lamartine, Sainte-Beuve) and graphic (Nodier) matter. They published their texts in the press (Le Globe) and presented them during meetings in artistic salons, which functioned as a kind of laboratory. Thanks to the support of Charles Nodier they could publish their poems in the best publishing houses, which largely contributed to their success. The final victory of the romantics was the premiere of Hernani by Victor Hugo in February 1830. Franz Liszt, who came to Paris in 1823, was an active participant in the artistic and intellectual life there. Moreover, he was also a friend of many prominent artists of the epoch, which can be seen in his letters, writings, and piano music from the early 1830s. A particular example of the relationship between the composer’s music and literary avant-garde is the piece Harmonies poétiques et religieuses of 1835. We find there the domination of the sound element, formal freedom, the intertwining of poetical techniques, experiments with structure, and a strong stress on the word aspect of the oeuvre, for example through very precise notation of tempo markings.

Keywords

PL

Franz Liszt; French literature; romanticism; piano music; Alphonse de Lamartine; Harmonies poétiques et religieuses

• Publisher: Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu
• Journal: Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology
• Year: 2014
• Issue: 13
• Pages: 93-106

Dates

published

2018-10-17

Contributors

author

Małgorzata Gamrat

• PhD in humanities, since October 2013 an assistant professor in the Chair of Theory and Aesthetics of Music of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Warsaw, where as a part of the grant ‘Fuga 2’ of the National Science Centre she carries out a research project Franz Liszt’s Lieder and their piano transcriptions as an example o f the 19th-century practice o f hybridisation o f genres and mutual enlightening o f arts. The main fields of her academic interest include Franz Liszt’s music and its interactions with other fields of art (especially with literature) as well as French and German culture of the 19th century. She carried out her academic research in Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Archives Nationales, Institut de France in Paris, and in The Franz Liszt Memorial Museum and Research Centre in Budapest. She took her doctorate at the Jagiellonian University and École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris, on the basis of the dissertation entitled Franz Liszt’s piano music in the context of the idea o f ‘correspondance des arts’, written under the supervision of professor Renata Suchowiejko and professor Catherine Massip. Małgorzata Gamrat participated in numerous international academic conferences and interdisciplinary research projects, both in the field of music and literature studies in Poland (e.g. ‘Laboratorium Myśli Muzycznej’) and abroad (e.g. ‘Musical Signification Project’ under the supervision of Eero Tarasti; ‘Od dialektü k literârnim jazyküm v Evropë / Dès les dialectes aux langues littéraires en l’Europe’, 2012).