FRANZ LISZT : Album d'un voyageur (Leslie Howard) 2CD (1998) APE (image+.cue), lossless

The Album d’un Voyageur is the first important published collection of Liszt’s early maturity and, although much of the collection was to be revised and the rest unaccountably discarded, it remains a significant body of work because of its daring originality and for setting the scene for much of Liszt’s creative process in its mixture of original works, transcriptions and fantasies, and with its incorporation of folk-music material or other composers’ themes.
Liszt’s inner necessity to arrive at new forms during the actual procedure of composition and through the transformation of themes, rather than by a conscious decision to adopt a standard form at the outset, is a characteristic of his entire life’s work. The very few pieces, outside simple dances and marches, where a standard formal structure is identified in his titles transpire to be a good deal more original in form than those titles might suggest. One need look no further than the Faust and Dante Symphonies, the Sonata or the ‘Weinen, Klagen’ Variations for confirmation. Of course this does not mean than Liszt’s approach to form is haphazard, but that it must be considered quite differently from the classical moulds which he eschewed. This ‘open form’, as Alfred Brendel so aptly defines it (in Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts) is found from the beginning in the three Apparitions, in the early single piece entitled Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, and in the whole of the Album d’un voyageur.

The travelling to which the title of the collection alludes concerns the period beginning with the flight of Liszt and the Countess Marie d’Agoult from Paris and their sojourn in Switzerland. This notorious liaison with a married member of the French aristocracy necessitated the journey, and Marie’s subsequent pregnancies and the births of Blandine, Cosima and Daniel prolonged it. Liszt was a combination of touring artist and artistic vagabond for almost a decade. Then, as throughout his later life, excepting the twelve years when he was Kapellmeister in Weimar, he was of no fixed abode, and indeed he never owned nor rented any permanent accommodation. To begin with, the travel was an intimate retreat with Marie, who was determined to develop his reading and his literary skills. It is at this time that the flow of musical journalism from Liszt’s pen begins (with some assistance from Marie, in all likelihood), and it is also the time when Liszt is finally able to marshall his creative thoughts. The plans for the Album d’un voyageur went through many permutations, and the final published version in three volumes—which is the basic text employed for the present recording—has a preface which speaks of future plans. To complicate matters further, different editions gave different titles to various parts of the work, one even employing the title ‘Années de pèlerinage’, and the early Hungarian works were intended to be a continuation of the series. But to facilitate reference, the works are now always referred to under the titles and numbering utilized here.
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