The use of cameras or recording equipment during the 

performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phones,

pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off.

Please note that late entry or reentry ofthe 

West Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

For the convenience of concertgoers, 

the Garden Cafe remains open for light refreshments

until 6:00 pm on Sundays.

Music Department

National Gallery ofArt

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

www.nga.gov

COVER: Wilhelm von Kaulbach, The Battle ofthe Catalaunian Plains (Battle ofChalons):

The Romans against Attila the Hun, 1837, oil on canvas, Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany

Photo Credit: bpk, Berlin/Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart/Art Resource, NY

The Seventieth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,850th Concert

Hanson-Kong Piano Duo

October 23, 2011

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Music by Franz Liszt (1811-1886)

From Weihnachtsbaum (Christmas Tree) (1882)

Psallite (Sing Psalms)

Die Flirten an der Krippe (The Shepherds at the Manger) 

Adeste fideles (Come, Ye Faithful)

Gleichsam als Marsch der heiligen drei Konige

(In the manner of “The March ofthe Three Holy Kings”)

Scherzoso (Playfully)

Man ziindet die Kerzen des Baumes an

(Lighting the Candles on the Tree)

Carillon (Chimes)

Schlummerlied (Slumber Song)

Altes provenzalisches Weihnachtslied

(Old Provencal Christmas Song)

Abendglocken (Evening Bells)

Ehemals (Old Times)

Polnisch (Polish)

Symphonic Poems, transcribed for two pianos by Liszt

Festklange (Festive Sounds) (1853)

Orphee (Orpheus) (1853-1854)

Hunnenschlacht (Battle ofthe Huns) (1857)

The Musicians

PAUL HANSON AND JOANNE KONG

With their distinguished and diverse backgrounds as solo and chamber

keyboardists, pianists Paul Hanson and Joanne Kong have received critical

acclaim for their musicianship, mastery oftone color, and exacting ensemble.

This concert is one of a number of all-Liszt programs that the Hanson-Kong

Duo has been presenting across the country in honor ofthe Liszt bicentennial.

Acclaimed for his “dexterous authority” (Los Angeles Times), “relentless

tension and drama” (The Virginian-Pilot), and “tender singing line, intelligent

phrasing, and total magisterial command” (San Antonio Express-News), Paul

Hanson holds degrees from Washington State University, the University of

Southern California, and the University ofOregon, and has studied with

Daniel Pollack, Leonard Stein, and Victor Steinhardt. A music faculty member

at the University of Richmond, he has a special interest in contemporary

music, reflected in his performances ofthe complete solo music of Schoenberg as well as repertoire of Pierre Boulez, Charles Ives, and Karlheinz

Stockhausen, among others. During the 2008-2009 season he gave several

performances of Elliott Carter’s Night Fantasies in honor ofthe composer’s

centennial and was a guest artist and faculty member at the New England

Conservatory’s Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice.

Joanne Kong’s performances have been praised for “great finesse and

flexibility” (The Washington Post), “utmost keyboard sensitivity and variety

oftone” (Richmond Times-Dispatch), and “remarkable technical ability” (The

Oregonian). She has the distinction of being the first musician to release

on one recording J. S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, played on the harpsichord,

and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, played on the piano. Kong also premiered Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Michael Colgrass’ solo keyboard

concerto Side by Side in the dual role of pianist and harpsichordist. A laureate

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in the 1983 National Beethoven Foundation Fellowship Auditions, recipient of

three Ruth Lorraine Close Fellowships, and winner ofthe Irl Allison Grand

Prize in the 1985 International Piano Recording Competition, Joanne Kong is

currently the director ofthe accompanying and chamber music programs at

the University of Richmond.

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Program Notes

During the past few years the classical music world has celebrated the

bicentennials of notable nineteenth-century Romantic composers Felix

Mendelssohn (1809-1847), Frederic Chopin (1810-1849), and Robert

Schumann (1810-1856). This year, the Liszt anniversary honors a musician

whose contributions have had a profound impact on the musical arts.

General audiences are most familiar with Liszt the pianist—he raised

the standard of piano technique to new heights of virtuosity, performing

over one thousand concerts from 1839 to 1847 as the first international

touring artist. Despite the astounding celebrity status he had achieved, at 

age thirty-six Liszt turned his attention to composing. Many ofhis piano

works are infused with an all-encompassing orchestral sense ofvaried

textures and sonorities, in addition to groundbreaking technical demands

over the full range ofthe keyboard. Some ofthe late works (notably Nuages

grises) display tonal ambiguity and chromaticism that anticipates the harmonic developments ofthe early twentieth century. In the orchestral realm,

Liszt is credited with inventing the symphonic poem, and he set the convention for modern conductors to dictate the interpretation of a performance

rather than merely marking beats.

The suite of pieces titled Weihnachtsbaum is one ofmany works from

Liszt’s late period that reflect a preoccupation with religious themes. Many of

these compositions display a concentrated or even austere quality, in marked

contrast to the bravura style of earlier years, but Weihnachtsbaum is an expression ofjoyful feelings ofthe holiday. The suite, in its original form as a work

for solo piano, is dedicated to the composer’s granddaughter Daniela (from

daughter Cosima’s marriage to conductor and pianist Hans von Billow).

Psallite, Der Hirten an der Krippe, and AdesteJideles are fairly straightforward

arrangements oftraditional Christmas songs. Scherzo and Carillon are sparkling miniatures that call for crisp articulation and nimble technique. These

are beautifully contrasted with the pieces that follow, Schlummerlied, with its

5
subtle harmonic shifts over a rippling accompaniment, and Altes provenzalisches Weihnachtslied, a playful adaptation oftwo French carols. Abendglocken

displays the impressionistic textures that Liszt adopted in some ofhis late

works, and the nostalgia ofold age is represented by Ehemals. Polnisch, the

final piece, brings the set to an exuberant and boisterous conclusion.

After Liszt retired from concert touring, he held the position of Kapellmeister in Weimar from 1848 to 1861 and composed, among numerous

landmark works, the first twelve ofhis thirteen symphonic poems. While

musical works drawing inspiration from literature, art, or historical subjects

were already an established norm by Liszt’s time, he expanded the genre with

lengthy musical narratives ofunprecedented originality and range of emotion,

unified through cyclic principles and thematic transformation. Composing

them initially for orchestra, Liszt also arranged the symphonic poems for two

pianos four hands and piano four hands. Motivated in part by publishers’

demands to disseminate works to a growing middle-class for whom the piano

was an important outlet for entertainment, Liszt created piano transcriptions

of nearly halfofhis works for other instruments and ensembles. That need

has passed, but today these arrangements still stand on their own as unique

compositions, expanding the boundaries ofRomantic pianism and sonority.

Festklange was written to celebrate Liszt’s impending marriage to Carolyne zu

Sayn-Wittgenstein, an event ultimately thwarted by legal issues concerning her

first marriage. Inspired by an Etruscan vase at the Louvre marked with an

image of Orpheus and his lyre, Liszt created a work to celebrate the healing an

ennobling power of art. Of all Liszt’s symphonic poems, Hunnenschlacht is the

most highly charged and programmatic, evoking the fifth century (451 a.d.)

battle between Attila’s Huns and the Romans. Multiple battle effects are exchanged between the two pianos, and the Cruxfdelis theme, representing the

victorious Christians, brings the work to a triumphant close.

Progi'am notes by Joanne Kong

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Next Week at the National Gallery ofArt

Genova and Dimitrov Piano Duo

Music by Franz Liszt

October 30, 2011

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Monadnock Music Trio

Music by Bogdanovic, Garner, Norman, Lindroth, and Simpson

Presented in honor of The Gothic Spirit of John Taylor Arms

November 2, 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

6

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

ofbaroque 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

7
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 of his 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.”

8

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 ofnature: 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.