The use of cameras or recording equipment during the 

performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phone

pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

Music Department

National Gallery of Art

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, dc

www.nga.gov

The Seventieth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,856th Concert

Alexandre Dossin, pianist

Stephen Ackert, organist

November 16, 2011

Wednesday, 12:10 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Music by Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

Apres une lecture de Dante (Fantasia quasi sonata), S. 163/7 (1849)

Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds (1866)

Arranged for organ by Camille Saint-Saens

Polonaise from Eugene Onegin, S. 429 (1880)

Deux melodies Russes (Arabeskes), S. 250 (c. 1842)

Le Rossignol (After a Romance by Alexander Alabyev)

Chanson bohemienne (After a Song by Piotr Boulakhov)

Tcherkessenmarsch (After a March from Ruslan and Ludmila by

Mikhail Glinka), S. 406 (1843)

Prelude and Fugue on the Theme B-A-C-H (1855)

Sponsored by the Richard B. and Sarah J. Marsten 

Charitable Remainder Unitrust
The Musicians

ALEXANDRE DOSSIN

Acclaimed by Martha Argerich as an “extraordinary musician” and by

international critics as a “phenomenon” and “a master of contrasts,” pianist

Alexandre Dossin has performed in over twenty countries, including international festivals in Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Japan, and the United States. 

A prizewinner in several international piano competitions, Dossin received

the First Prize and the Special Prize at the 2003 Martha Argerich International

Piano Competition in Buenos Aires, Argentina. His CD releases have been

praised in reviews in American Record Guide, Clavier, Diapason, Fanfare,

The Financial Times, and other international publications. He has performed

with conductors Keith Clark, Charles Dutoit, Michael Gielen, and Isaac

Karabtchevsky, and with the Brazilian National Symphony, Buenos Aires

Philharmonic, Mozarteum University Symphony, and Tchaikovsky Conservatory Symphony Orchestra. Born and raised in Porto Alegre, Brazil, Dossin

spent nine years studying in Russia, before establishing residency in the

United States. A graduate ofthe University ofTexas at Austin and the Moscow

Tchaikovsky Conservatory, he holds the position of associate professor at the

University of Oregon School of Music.

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STEPHEN ACKERT

Now in his seventh year as head ofthe music department at the National

Gallery ofArt, Stephen Ackert studied the organ at Oberlin College; Northwestern University; the Hochschule fur Musik in Frankfurt am Main, 

Germany; and the University ofWisconsin in Madison, where he completed

his doctoral studies in organ in 1974. A resident ofthe Washington area

since 1979, he has performed at many ofits premier venues, including the

Kennedy Center, the National Cathedral, and the National Shrine ofthe

Immaculate Conception. In 2008 he undertook his ninth recital tour of

historic concert halls and churches in Germany, and in 2010 he played for

the national convention ofthe American Liszt Society.

In addition to his administrative duties at the Gallery, Ackert presents

lectures and preconcert talks on the interrelationships between music and

art. His lectures have also been heard at the Amalfi Coast Music and Art

Festival in Italy; the Austrian, German, and Italian Embassies in Washington;

the Kennedy Center; and the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore.

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Next week at the National Gallery ofArt

National Gallery ofArt Orchestra

Music by Barber, Bernstein,

Ives, and Leshnoff

November 20, 2011

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Verdehr Trio

Music by Daugherty, Hovhaness,

Menotti, Rorem, and Winkler

Presented in honor of

Warhol: Headlines

November 23, 2011

Wednesday, 12:10 pm

West Building Lecture Hall

above Jean-Jacques Feuchere, Dante Meditating on the “Divine Comedy”, 1843,

pen and brown ink with brown wash and watercolor over graphite, heightened

with white gouache, National Gallery ofArt, Gift ofthe Christian Humann Foundation

cover Giulio Cesare Procaccini, The Ecstasy ofthe Magdalen, 1616 /1620, 

oil on canvas, National Gallery ofArt, Patrons’ Permanent Fund

Baroque Transformations

and Altered States in the

Music of Franz Liszt

DAVID GARIFF

NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART
Trasumanar significar per verba non si poria

(To GO BEYOND THE HUMAN IS NOT POSSIBLE IN WORDS)

Dante, Paradiso, i, 70-1

Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend

AND COMBINE WITH THOUGHT...

Franz Liszt

For the nineteenth-century Romantic, feeling was everything. The

desire to explore and to understand the subjective experience was

paramount to the painter, poet, composer, and novelist. These subjective states took many forms: dreams, ecstasy, inspiration, but also

darker moods such as delirium, melancholy, grief, and a penchant

for the morbid and the grotesque. The greatest triumph for the

Romantic artist was to awaken emotions in the viewer, reader, or

listener. The concepts oftransformation and transfiguration reside 

at the heart ofsuch thinking, what today might be called “altered 

states.” Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was a composer committed to feeling. His inspirations included Beethoven, Byron, Dante, Goethe,

and Shakespeare. He shared this attitude with his contemporaries

Chopin, Schumann, and, most especially, Hector Berlioz. As a

prominent figure in the progressive New German School in Weimar,

Liszt also recognized this trait in the music of Richard Wagner 

(1813-1883).

Liszt aspired to convey in music what he felt emanated from the

art and architecture ofthe great masters. In a letter from Italy to

Berlioz dated October 2,1839, he writes:

Day by day myfeelings and thoughts gave me a better insight into

the hidden relationship that unites all works ofgenius. Raphael

and Michelangelo increased my understanding ofMozart and
Beethoven; Giovanni Pisano, Fra Beato, and II Francia explained

Allegri, Marcello, and Palestrina to me. Titian and Rossini appeared to me like twin stars shining with the same light. The Colosseum and the Campo Santo are not asforeign as one thinks to the

Eroica Symphony and the Requiem. Dante hasfound his pictorial

expression in Orcagna and Michelangelo, and someday perhaps he

willfind his musical expression in the Beethoven ofthefuture.

In Liszt’s Years ofPilgrimage (Annees de pelerinage), a set of

three suites for solo piano that he worked on intermittently between

1858 and 1883, sections are devoted to musical evocations ofworks

by Raphael and Michelangelo. Liszt’s taste in visual art extended 

to most ofthe great names in the Louvre. He remarked that his

ambition was to give a piano recital in the Salon Carre ofthe Louvre

surrounded by the canvases of Correggio, Giorgione, Leonardo,

Raphael, Rembrandt, Tintoretto, Titian, and Veronese.

Liszt’s predilections toward the flamboyant and the dramatic

led him logically to baroque art as a source ofinspiration. Seeking 

to convey “altered states” of emotion meant embracing the mystical

and the visionary as well as the sublime and the beautiful. Indeed, 

the sublime often resided within the confines ofthese more visceral

and nonclassical modes of expression. In this regard, Liszt shares 

much in common with Berlioz.

Emerging out ofthe composer’s own suffering after a failed relationship, Berlioz’s Symphoniefantastique (1830) broke this ground

for Romantic composers in both its formal and thematic languages.

Its full title describes “An Episode in the Life of an Artist.” Berlioz’s

notes for the symphony’s program refer to “morbid disposition,”

“powerful imagination,” “sickness ofthe soul,” “jealous fury,” and

“volcanic love,” all brought about in the young artist who “poisons 

himselfwith opium in an attack of despairing passion.” To convey

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such strange and hallucinatory effects, Berlioz pushes the traditional limits ofthe orchestra into new realms of color, sound, and

programmatic structure.

Liszt, who attended the premiere ofthe Symphoniefantastique,

also mingles the grotesque with the voluptuous, the sacred with the

profane, the divine and the diabolical. In 1877 he writes, “Music is at

once the divine and satanic art that more than all other arts leads us

into temptation.” Liszt and Berlioz capture the essence of Romantic 

delirium—seeking sensations and expressing their transformative

power through music. Berlioz and Liszt introduce, reconfigure, and 

restate leitmotifs to achieve thematic transformations. This practice 

finds its parallels in the ecstatic themes and formal characteristics

of baroque art. In the same way that baroque painting and sculpture represent a more dynamic and expressive alternative to earlier 

classical models, so too does the idea ofthematic transformation in

music expand the possibilities ofthe classical sonata form in favor of

a more painterly and dramatic language.

The aesthetic theories of correspondances and synesthesia play a

major role in any discussion ofthe relationship between music and

painting in the nineteenth century. The beliefin the interrelatedness ofthe arts captured the imaginations ofmost artists ofthe time. 

Music that evoked colors and paintings that aspired to the conditions

ofmusic were the goals. From Eugene Delacroix and Carl Maria

von Weber to Gauguin and Debussy, color and sound comingled to

provide the highest gratification ofthe senses, even to evoke scents

and perfumes. This was nowhere more evident than in the writings ofthe French poet, essayist, and art critic Charles Baudelaire

(1821-1867), whose influence in this regard was far-reaching.

Liszt was himself a synesthete. As a conductor, he employed an

expressive array offacial gestures and body movements (familiar

today in modern conducting, but new with Berlioz). In speaking to

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the orchestra, however, Liszt used painterly analogies, referring to

tones as colors, and asking members ofthe orchestra to play a bit

“bluer,” or to make a note more “violet.”

Liszt believed in the cross-fertilization ofthe arts. He numbered

among his friends such luminaries as the painters Delacroix and

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the writers George Sand and 

Victor Hugo, and the poets Heinrich Heine and Alphonse de Lamartine. His tone poems, symphonic poems, and program music attest

to this on the simplest level. Liszt was not trying to represent a poem

or a painting however. On this, he is clear when he writes in 1837:

It is obvious that things which can appear only objectively to the

perception can in no wayfurnish connecting points to music; the

poorest ofapprentice landscape painters could give afew chalk

strokes a much morefaithful picture than a musician operating

with all the resources ofthe best orchestra. But ifthese same things

are subjectivated to dreaming, to contemplation, to emotional uplift,

have they not a kinship with music, and should not music be able to

translate them into its mysterious language?

Liszt’s romantic image as a fiery virtuoso and demonic personality overshadows the religious aspects ofhis life and art. As

a young man, he expressed an interest in becoming a priest. His 

father had briefly been a Franciscan monk and his mother was

devout and inclined to mysticism. Many ofthe themes in his music

deal with aspiration and transfiguration. His love of Dante was, in

part, a reflection ofsuch concerns. As a youth, he read Christian

literature including The Lives ofthe Saints and Thomas a Kempis’

The Imitation ofChrist. He describes his heart as “entirely filled with

the mystical feelings oflove and religion.”

Sacred music comprises an important part of Liszt’s oeuvre.

He is a musical mystic. He writes, “Is not music the mysterious

language of a faraway spirit world whose wondrous accents, echoing

within us, awaken us to a higher, more intensive life?”

Among Liszt’s own favorite piano pieces was the Benediction de

Dieu dans la solitude written in 1847, the year he retired from public

performing to begin a more reclusive life in Weimar. Lamartine’s

poem ofthe same name inspired the composition. Its themes of

religious solitude, contemplation, ecstasy, and the role meditation

plays in elevating one’s soul to the divine were close to Liszt’s heart.

Such beliefs echo the Discalced Carmelite teachings ofboth Saint

Teresa ofAvila and Saint John ofthe Cross, frequently portrayed in

baroque art.

In October 1861, Liszt moved to Rome. On July 31,1865, he 

was ordained an abbe (a semi-lay position)—the Catholic (and

specifically Franciscan) traditions of his childhood had reasserted

themselves. Aside from its religious significance, however, this new 

status reinforced Liszt’s beliefs in the divinity of art and the role of

the artist as priest and “‘the Bearer ofthe Beautiful,’ an intermediary between God and man.”

Alan Walker has written eloquently about the Franciscan 

tradition in Liszt’s family and the composer’s personal devotion

to Saints Francis ofAssisi and Francis of Paola (Calabria). While 

in Rome, Liszt completed his Franciscan Legends for piano: Saint

Francis Preaching to the Birds and Saint Francis ofPaola Walking on

the Waters (1863). Liszt referred to Saint Francis ofAssisi as “the

glorious poor servant ofChrist.” He considered both men his patron

saints. In Saint Francis Preaching to the Birds, Liszt found inspiration

in the anonymous fourteenth-century text, The Little Flowers ofSaint

Francis ofAssisi:

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He lifted up his eyes and saw the trees which stood by the wayside

filled with a countless multitude ofbirds; at which he marveled, and

said to his companions: 'Wait a littlefor me in the road, and I will

go and preach to my little brothers the birds.’ And he went into the

field, and began to preach to the birds that were on the ground; and

forthwith those which were in the trees came around him, and not

one moved during the whole sermon; nor would theyfly away until

the Saint had given them his blessing.

Contrary to Liszt’s sentiment quoted earlier, in these two works

he does set out to imitate various effects of nature: the chirping and

tweeting ofbirds and a storm at sea.

Contradiction and complexity lie at the heart of Franz Liszt’s life

and art. The quintessential Romantic, he was also a man of deep

religious and mystical beliefs. Reconciling the passion of Byron

with the piety of Saint Francis, he reveled in his celebrity status but

also required long periods ofsolitude and monastic contemplation. 

Virtuoso, composer, conductor, public icon, and religious cleric,

he was nourished by fame yet recognized the wisdom in Nicolas

Chamfort’s beliefthat “Celebrity is the punishment oftalent and

the chastisement ofmerit.”

DAVID GARIFF IS A LECTURER AT THE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART.

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