LISZT FRANZ: (1811-1886) Hungarian composer, pianist and conductor of the Romantic period. A good Autograph musical manuscript, unsigned, four pages (manuscript paper), slim oblong folio (approx. 13 x 7.5”, cut from larger sheets), n.p., n.d. (c.1858-59). The manuscript is a partial draft of Liszt’s song Ich mochte hingehn (LW N31, S296), the pages ruled with twelve staves per page, scored for voice and piano, four systems of three staves per page, with the exception of the final page, some 104 bars (nine of which are cancelled) and the first two pages paginated ‘3’ and ‘4’. The manuscript includes the text, in German, taken from Georg Herwegh’s poem Strophen aus der Fremde (stanzas four to six from the total of seven). Some light age wear and a few neat splits to the edges of the central vertical folds, only very slightly affecting the music and text, and with a few small tears to the upper edge of the second leaf, otherwise about VG

The present manuscript dates from around 1858-59 when Liszt was revising a number of his earlier songs for Gesammelte Lieder and another incomplete draft for Ich mochte hingehn from the same period is held within the Frederick R. Koch collection at Yale’s Beinecke Library. The fact that multiple compositional drafts of the song exist demonstrates the manner in which Liszt worked on his songs, continually revising them over the years until they essentially became new works, sometimes unrecognisable from the original versions. After entering into an agreement with Schlesinger to prepare a collected edition of his songs, published as Gesammelte Lieder between 1855-59, Liszt revised earlier songs such as Ich mochte hingehn, many of which originated in the 1840s, and what began as fair copies soon developed into compositional drafts as he started to revise them as he progressed. During this process Liszt used manuscript paper originally intended for orchestral music, cut down or torn from larger sheets, as is the case with the present manuscript.

The musicologist Susan Youens, one of the world’s foremost authorities on German lieder previously wrote ‘The poet of Ich möchte hingehn, Georg Herwegh, was also known for his revolutionary political poems (he had to flee to Switzerland twice) and his translations of Lamartine and Shakespeare; he was the first recipient of Marie d’Agoult’s ‘Liszt novel’ Nélida. But the text of this song, among Liszt’s longer lieder, starts as a multipartite vision of the ‘good death’, analogous to the last gleam of sunset dying in the womb of the eternal, like the star in fullest glory sinking quietly into the blue depths, like a flower’s fragrance dispelled in air, like the dying tone of a harp, etc. But poem and song culminate in the denial that any such death awaits humanity’s broken heart. The first two episodes of this masterpiece (one of Liszt’s best songs) each begin with the same rising chromatic sequence, fraught with yearning, and end with an un-final harmony and a fermata, before the meditation on death resumes, wending its way to the singer’s final shriek and the fading of the piano’s last minor chord. Liszt first created this song, which anticipates Wagner’s use of the half-diminished ‘Tristan’ chord by ten years, as a final farewell to Caroline de Saint-Cricq, his first love from when both were teenagers in Paris’.