Liszt: Transcriptions of Religious Works (Liszt Complete Piano Music, Vol. 62)

Around five per cent of Liszt’s output – transcriptions and arrangements aside – centred around religious-themed works. In the 1830s he fancied uniting theatre and church ‘on a colossal scale’. Two decades later he believed he might become the Palestrina of his age. His master statements, covering a period roughly from the late 1840s to the late 1870s, were imposingly conceived – among them psalm settings Die Legende von der Heiligen Elisabeth, the Christus oratorio (‘my musical Will and Testament’), the Graner Mass, Requiem, Ungarische Krönungsmesse, Die heilige Cäcilia and Via Crucis. A handful of focussed piano poems, not to mention numerous incidental references or episodic allusions spanning more than 50 years, magicked theology wondrously into the recital room – most famously the two Franciscan Legends (1863, subsequently orchestrated), Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude from the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses after Lamartine (1847), and numbers from the third volume of the Années de pèlerinage (published in 1883).