LDV95

OLIVIER LATRY 23 Between 1859 and 1862, Liszt lost two of his children, Daniel and Blandine. These tragedies influenced the writing of the Variations on ‘Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen’ in which the composer initially revolts, then resigns himself. How is the work structured? The first part of ‘Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen’ (Weeping, wailing, lamenting, fearing), based on the opening chorus of the eponymous cantata BWV 12 and its later reworking as the ‘Crucifixus’ of the Mass in B minor, displays extreme violence in Liszt’s conception, as if to echo the Inferno of Dante’s Divine Comedy , so powerfully anchored in his musical philosophy. Here, the literary world in its secular dimension and the religious world come together. The central recitative, for its part, foreshadows Via Crucis (1874), inspired by the fourteen Stations of the Cross. This evocation of the Passion and its drama is set against the hope inherent in the work’s conclusion: the chorale ‘Was Gott tut das ist wohlgetan’ (What God does is well done) introduces the key of F major for the first time since the beginning of the piece, provoking an unprecedented feeling of liberation. Hence Liszt, himself a fervent Catholic, uses a Lutheran chorale as a symbol of the resignation that finds its consolation in faith. Marcel Dupré’s transcription, made in 1948, follows a similar approach to Jean Guillou’s much later syncretic version of the B-A-C-H Fantasy. The pianistic and organistic techniques are similar, but Dupré allowed himself a few liberties, which explains why the piece is more of an arrangement than a transcription. We don’t know whether Dupré himself performed it in this form. He presented the manuscript to an American organist, and it has been published only recently.