Music Review: Liszt in a Crypt

Franz Liszt: Poetic and Religious Harmonies, S. 173

Performed by Adam Tendler and Jenny Lind

Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn

September 24, 2019

The music of Franz Liszt (1811-1886) is justly critiqued for being all flash, little substance. After all, he was among the first of what we would now call “rock stars”, touring Europe as a young man and inducing women to swoon, with his wild hair, fierce demeanor, and virtuosic swooping and pounding on the grand piano, then still a rather new, sexy instrument. The recent “Death of Classical” series concert in the catacombs of the historic Brooklyn Green-Wood Cemetery showed a different, more innovative and reflective side of the composer. He composed three sets of pieces called Poetic and Religious Harmonies”. The 10-piece set performed in Brooklyn was written in 1847 while he was shacked up in Poland with his mistress, the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgensein. She was a married noblewoman who swooned at one of Liszt’s concerts and left her rich husband to live with the composer-pianist. She lobbied the Pope to (initially) void her wedding (divorce was not allowed), but this was reversed after further lobbying by her husband and his ally, Russia’s Tsar. So instead she lived unmarried with Liszt for 40 years, apparently mostly chastely, since Liszt abandoned his hedonistic persona when he took priestly orders at age 55 (a little too late, if you ask me). Those romantics!

This set of pieces is not famous, but works well heard in its entirety. Because Liszt mostly foregoes his usual endless virtuosic double octaves, 6 octave scales, etc. he can focus on very interesting harmonic experimentation and more inward writing. The pieces range from very simple chorales set on the Catholic liturgy (Pater Noster) to longer, more elaborate reflections on life, death, and religion, with titles like “The Blessing of God in Solitude” and “The Hymn of the Wakening Child”. The affect, if not the harmony, reminded me of the music of another composer-mystic from a century later, Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992). In both composers, odd harmonic shifts, sometimes at very slow tempos, create an otherworldly ambiance. Liszt sometimes cannot resist some flash, as the relentless chords of a funeral procession in “Funérailles” accelerates into a chaotic, virtuosic gallop, but overall it was remarkably interesting to here an all-Liszt concert, as surprising as that was to me. I think we don’t hear many of these pieces because none is the type of stand-alone piece that you would insert among works of Beethoven or Schubert on a conventional recital. However, I would love to hear an intrepid pianist pair some of these with late Liszt (which verges on Debussy impressionism), works of Messiaen, or maybe wild visionary works of the Russian Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915). This music also reminded me that the early Romantic composers were just as shocking and innovative in their day as were the early twentieth century composers. Chopin and Liszt revolutionized harmony as Schoenberg did a century later; Schumann shook up rhythm as did Stravinsky a century later. We should give them more credit as innovators. Said another way, I think the gap between Beethoven and Schubert (who both died when Liszt was first composing as a teenager) and these early Romantic composers is just as big as the gap between the late romantics Mahler and Puccini vs. the contemporary revolutionaries Stravinsky/Berg/Schoenberg.

The performance venue was striking, as was the effort to get there. Concertgoers met near the entrance of the beautiful Green-Wood Cemetery, famed for its large monuments and statuary, and set on steep hills overlooking New York Harbor (with a nice view across to the Statue of Liberty). At twilight, most of the audience then walked in a group 15 minutes up and down hills to the entrance to the “catacombs”, actually a 200 x 12 foot enclosed above-ground tunnel with family crypts along each side. 

The piano was set up midway down the long tunnel, turned at right angles to the tunnel’s long axis. There was an elaborate set of circular mirrors set up around the piano, perhaps intended to enhance audience viewing from different angles (odd looking, and not terribly useful from my perspective). The audience faced the piano on each side, so we watched other audience members as well as the pianists. The two artists played well, but I thought Mr. Tendler had more sensitivity and flexibility than Ms. Lind. I also question Ms. Lind’s choice in the “Bénédiction de Dieu dans la Solitude” (The Blessing of God in Solitude), perhaps the most famous individual piece in the set, to turn the rapid arpeggios in the left hand into octaves. This was undoubtedly flashy, but not justified in the score, and added an unwanted, pounding “Liszt as swoon-inducer” aspect to the otherwise meditative evening. I really enjoyed how the eerie catacombs created its own meditative ambiance. After the 90 minutes of music, we all walked back another 15 minutes, this time in moonlit darkness, guided by intermittent torches set up along the cemetery walk. The spooky monuments, statuary, and trees gave a Haunted Mansion feel to the whole thing, and it was an appropriate way to end an interesting, innovative, and eye-opening concert of music that deserves more hearing.