Preparing for Liszt

Over the last three weeks, I have been practicing for the Liszt “Weinen, Klagen...” which is to be played at the Congregational Church on March 14. Most of the work has been at the piano, and a large share of it on one twenty-measure passage (measures 163-183). My lessons from Distler at Christmas have been helpful here: I have been working this up with the metronome as I did with parts of the Distler piece, four measures at a time, and there is a fair chance that it might be ready in time.

My first rehearsal across town at the church is scheduled for Friday, and I will only have perhaps one additional session before the recital – the minister over there has decided (sensibly) that we organists make too much noise for him to hold counselling sessions in his office, so Fridays are no longer available. This one is, because he is out of town. The other practice days which are available, Wednesdays and Thursdays, do not work very well for my schedule.

So, I need to use this Friday efficiently.

I became familiar with the instrument last year, and have the stoplist that I carefully noted down, with the locations of all the stops and the combination pistons. More importantly, I have a good sense of how the individual stops and combinations sound. So, an experiment: I spent about three hours today working out a fairly detailed registration scheme in my office. It will doubtless need tweaking when I hear it in the church, but that will take less time than creating the scheme from scratch.

There are between thirty and thirty-seven registration changes in this twenty-minute piece. Some of them can be made by hand; most of the rest can be made with manual pistons and adjustments to the couplers. I think I can get by with one general piston, which is used at the beginning and at two subsequent locations in the score. But I will be making heavy use of all of the manual pistons, setting them up from softest to loudest for each division. There are several places in the piece where Liszt intends a gradual crescendo from a fairly soft dynamic to pretty much full organ: the manual pistons will make this possible, along with judicious use of the Swell pedal.

Lessons from Liszt? The construction of a registration scheme such as this is one. Another is the pianistic nature of the piece, which has been good for my technical development. Perhaps most of all, there is the need for an all-out Romantic engagement with the music, full of rubato and expressiveness in a manner that makes Franck or Brahms or Mendelssohn (composers of the period with whom I am more comfortable) seem positively reserved. Liszt poured his soul into his music, and the performer must do the same.

Many moments in the piece feel Wagnerian, which would please Liszt. He was a staunch supporter of Wagner from the earliest days to the end, and arranged for the first productions of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin at a time when it was not at all a given that Wagner could get these operas performed. Liszt's daughter Cosima ended up as Mrs. Richard Wagner, though in a manner with which her father was not at all pleased: she jilted her husband (and Liszt's close friend) Hans von Bülow to run off with Wagner, doing this while von Bülow was preoccupied with trying as music director and conductor to bring Wagner's Tristan und Isolde to production, a monumental undertaking even now, and more so then when such music was beyond anything that had been experienced. Liszt refused to attend their wedding, though in the end he died at Bayreuth, Cosima (rather unwillingly) at his side.

I share Franck's suspicion of Wagner – Franck procured a copy of the score to Tristan, and after studying it scrawled across the first page “This is poison.” But Wagner did have a religious streak of sorts, as can be heard in Parsifal. Liszt had even more of one, and this piece, the “Weinen, Klagen...”, is one of the strongest expressions of it. As I work on this, I sense that Liszt was like many of us – full of conflicts and doubts, very far from perfection in morals or manner of life, but casting himself upon the mercy of the Lord, much like the publican: “God be merciful to me a sinner.”

In the Via Crucis, an organ solo version of which I will be playing at our parish as part of the March 6 Stations of the Cross, the vocal score ends with repeated cries of Ave, crux... and Crux fidelis, spes unica. In this, I join Liszt: there is no other hope for any of us. I will try to pour my soul into the “Weinen, Klagen” as he did, trusting in its final affirmation: Was Gott tut, daß ist wohlgetan.