Theodora Serbanescu-Martin: Pianistic Invocations: Liszt's Poetic Harmonies

Liszt, Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, S. 173 (written/reworked in 1847, published 1853), selections:

1. Invocation
2. Ave Maria
3. Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude ('The Blessing of God in Solitude')
4. Pensée des morts ('In Memory of the Dead')
5. Pater Noster
6. Funérailles (Funeral)
7. Cantique d'Amour (Hymn of Love)

Composed and repeatedly reworked across the 1830s and 1840s, Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses—one of the most significant cycles for solo piano (and over ninety minutes in its complete form)—stands at the spiritual and poetic center of his output. The title is borrowed directly from a collection of poems by Alphonse de Lamartine, whose lyrical, metaphysical, and politically liberal writing deeply shaped Liszt’s imagination. Like Lamartine’s verse, this music meditates on solitude, prayer, mourning, and transcendence, offering an inward spirituality rather than doctrinal belief.

Liszt worked on these pieces over many years, revising earlier versions into the unified cycle published in 1853. Several movements reflect periods of retreat and contemplation during his time in the Polish countryside at Woronińce, while others respond to personal loss and to Romanticism’s deep preoccupation with death, memory, and the sacred. The result is music that inhabits a charged space between devotion and doubt—rooted in Catholic ritual yet infused with metaphysical questioning, humanitarian idealism, and a fascination with what survives beyond the visible world.

At the heart of this cycle is not only religious devotion, but devotion as such: an affective orientation toward something absent, distant, or only partially knowable. Prayer here functions as love and longing rather than doctrine; repetition becomes a form of waiting, and sound itself becomes a means of address—calling toward what cannot be possessed, revived, or fully named. Liszt’s sacred language is inseparable from his language of love, whether remembered, deferred, or sustained across absence and time.

This concert is offered in that spirit. It is dedicated to love in its many Romantic guises: love of the divine, love of the dead, love of the distant beloved, love as fidelity carried across loss. In Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude, stillness becomes an ethical and emotional stance; in Pensée des morts, remembrance takes the place of presence; in Pater Noster, collective prayer turns into intimate invocation. These works ask for tender attention, patience, and vulnerability.

Together, they present Liszt far beyond his reputation as a virtuoso showman: as a poetic thinker at the keyboard, using sound as ritual—at once prayer, memory, and spell—to explore belief, longing, and the sustaining power of love itself.