Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, Part II: Romantic Death and Transcendence

Romantic Death & Transcendence: Pianistic Difficulty and Dead Hands with Liszt and Brahms

J. Brahms
Chaconne in D minor, after J. S. Bach, for the left hand alone, from 5 Studies, Anh. 1a/1 (1877)

F. Liszt
Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, S. 173, Part II

1. Hymne de l'enfant à son réveil (The Awaking Child’s Hymn)
2. Funérailles (Funeral Rites)
3. Miserere, d’après Palestrina
4. Andante lagrimoso
5. Cantique d’amour (Hymn of Love)

Composed and repeatedly reworked across the 1830s and 1840s, Liszt’s Harmonies poétiques et religieuses stands at the philosophical center of his output. The title comes from a collection of poems by Alphonse de Lamartine, whose writing explored solitude, mortality, spiritual transformation, and the persistence of consciousness beyond bodily life. Liszt revised these works over decades, shaping them into the unified cycle published in 1853. Several movements emerged during periods of retreat and mourning, while others respond to the nineteenth century’s deep preoccupation with death — not only as mystical or religious rite of passage, but as a material and existential threshold.

The later movements of the cycle turn explicitly toward the physical and metaphysical consequences of death. In Funérailles, Liszt constructs one of the most extreme pianistic landscapes ever written: tolling bells, violent eruptions, and vast passages of left-hand octaves that transform the pianist’s hand into something paradoxical — both animate and mechanical, expressive and corpse-like. The music inhabits an ambiguous space between funeral ritual and bodily afterlife, where sound appears to emanate from a hand no longer fully governed by the living self.

Johannes Brahms’s transcription of Bach’s Chaconne intensifies this confrontation between body, absence, and sound. Written for the left hand alone, the piece translates one of the most monumental works of the violin repertoire into a form that deliberately overburdens the pianist’s body. Here, the absence of hand enables the transcription of violinistic difficulty, which would be eclipsed under the shared labor of both hands. Brahms described the original as containing “a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings,” and his transcription preserves that world by forcing a single hand to sustain textures, harmonies, and voices normally distributed across multiple limbs. Rather than providing a "literalist" transcription that captures the full violin texture, Brahms transforms the original through a material-bodily transaction of labor, where the original effortful difficulty of the strings is both heard and felt through the keys: a "Frankenstein"-like idiom that is neither fully pianistic nor violinistic.

Both Brahms and Liszt used the piano to test the limits of embodiment. Their most difficult works require the performer to inhabit states of physical asymmetry, mechanical repetition, and extreme exertion — conditions that blur the boundary between living agency and mechanical automation. Nineteenth-century writers often described virtuoso hands as uncanny or autonomous entities, capable of continuing beyond the conscious will, as if animated by forces both physiological and spectral. In this sense, the pianist becomes a medium through which sound survives the body that produces it.

Together, these works explore the piano as an instrument of transformation: a site where flesh becomes mechanism, effort is synonymous with ritual, and sound emerges from the threshold between life and death. Difficulty, for both Brahms and Liszt, is philosophical as well as material: it stages the fragile boundary between presence and absence, revealing virtuosity itself as a form of endurance at the edge of disappearance.