‘Petrarch's Sonnets’ by Liszt
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Date
2013
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Katedra Muzykologii, Wydawnictwo Naukowe PTPN, Wydawnictwo Naukowe UAM
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Abstract
The article ‘Petrarch’s Sonnets’ by Liszt revolves around the phenomenon of transformation,
which dominated F. Liszt’s works. His impressive composing achievements made Liszt an
unequalled author of all types of elaborations, paraphrases, adaptations, transcripts of both his own
and other composer’s works, representing various styles and epochs. What is more, the transformation
techniques employed by Liszt, diff erent from the commonly applied evolutionary ones, coupled
with extended tonality and harmony as well as new textures, resulted in an extremely broad scale of
expression and subtly diverse expressive eff ects.
Three of Petrarch’s Sonnets from the Rerum vulgarium fragmenta collection are dedicated to Laura and
represent this article’s major area of interest. The Hungarian composer worked on them three times:
twice he composed them as songs and once as a piano triptych included in the Années de Pèlerinage.
Dèuxieme Année: Italie series. His interpretation of the Sonnets, as well as the remaining works in the
series, was inspired by the art of the old Italian masters married with the Romantic idea of correspondence
des artes. While it is a part of artistic tradition to turn poetic works into songs (resulting in the
vocal lyrics so typical of Romanticism), adding a musical dimension to a sonnet, a piece of poetry with
a specifi c organisation of its content, a unique form and verse discipline, seems risky. It is extremely
diffi cult to successfully transfer equivalent themes and structures onto a diff erent medium i.e. piano
music. By turning to Petrarch’s Sonnets, Liszt created congenial palimpsests, refl ecting the syntactical
and formal rudiments of the verse but, fi rst and foremost, managing to portray Laura in new incarnations,
subtly changing in the eternal search for the ideal of femininity, the so-called “Ewig-weibliche”.
Especially in the piano version, Liszt seems to have accomplished the esoteric subtlety of the “Sprache
über Sprache” available to and understood solely by poets and those in the know.
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Keywords
Franz Liszt, Années de Pèlerinage. Dèuxieme Année – Italie, piano music, Sonetto 47 del Petrarca, Sonetto 104 del Petrarca, Sonetto 123 del Petrarca
Citation
Interdisciplinary Studies in Musicology 13, Poznań 2013, pp. 43-56
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ISBN
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1734-2406