Franz Liszt and Self Love / Franz Liszt et l’Amour de Soi

FRANZ LISZT — ANNÉES DE PÈLERINAGE — YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE — CHÂTEAU D’AULTERIBE — 8–11 SEPTEMBER 2022 — SUZANA BARTAL — 2018

The concert of the three years of pilgrimage presented in Aulteribe Château, in fact originally, a medieval castle essential in the castle network of Auvergne protecting the plain and the province, included Jerôme Granjon and Suzana Bartal with two younger pianists, Julien Lespagnol and Shoma Oto. The originality of the three concerts over two days was that the piano was Georges Onslow’s Pleyel piano built in 1846, that is to say, a piano on which Liszt could have played, and the sound is different, the power is different, the harmonics are all different from a modern piano. The CDs are recorded on modern pianos and the truthfulness of the heritage piano is missing and we are slightly deprived of some authenticity. The three concerts integrated small poems illustrating or supporting the music and several interventions of a lecturer trying to explain what we should see in this music, and I say see voluntarily since the lecturer insisted, from beginning to end, on the fact that Liszt was trying to bring painting and literature inside the music and trying to be all-sensorial, synesthetic, though I am not entirely convinced.

Music is by definition synesthetic since it is a language that only uses sonorous elements, the notes, their intervals, and the rhythm, and the three elements here all make the human body react in many different ways, along many different sensuous and sensitive lanes and paths, especially when the imagination enters the court like a tennis ball falling from the sky. But I felt frustrated with some marvelous pieces of poetry from various countries and in various languages being given to us exclusively in French, translated then, hence betrayed, instead of being performed in a bilingual performance, in the original language, and in French. Lord Byron lost his iambic music for some stiff syllabic French meter with rhymes that are of course too heavy for English. Translating Lord Byron, Alighieri Dante, Francesco Petrarca, and some others, side by side with Baudelaire, Étienne Pivert de Senancour, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, Paul Verlaine, Victor Hugo, and Alphonse de Lamartine is a…