Liszt - Ave maris stella, S34/1 (Hungarian State Chorus)

The abbé Liszt has always been a familiar figure. Less familiar is the fact that Liszt's preoccupation with religious thought goes right back to his teenage years in Paris—it is evident that Liszt's adolescence was lonely as there is not a single piece of evidence to suggest that the fifteen-year-old had any real friends his own age (his sole companion being his father) and this, in combination with his growing aversion to life as a touring curiosity, led the young Franz to become withdrawn, introspective, and deeply religious. Seeking solace in Christian literature, he had read the Lives of Saints, knew every page of the Imitation of Christ by the great mystic Thomas à Kempis, elevating some of its aphorisms to the level of moral precepts. The contradictions between Liszt’s perceived lifestyle and his devout intentions were a regular subject for speculation and even ridicule, but any proper investigation of Liszt’s life and letters reveals a deeply thoughtful and complex man, whose religious sensibilities must be taken absolutely seriously; if one reads Liszt’s passionate, occasionally forlorn letters to Marie d’Agoult from the early 1830s, especially those written during their enforced apartness, one does not see a man who was intent on enjoying his eligible-bachelor status but a young man who on having his first love affair thwarted at the age of seventeen spent days prostrate on the flagstones of St-Vincent-de-Paul, who in his eventual elopement with d’Agoult escaped the hullabaloo of Paris for the peaceful surroundings of the Swiss Alps, and who by the age of thirty-five, rejected his itinerant life as the world’s most famous virtuoso pianist–with its concomitant temptations and glamorous stardom, and its exhausting and disruptive rootlessness–in favour of a quieter and more settled existence in the provincial town of Weimar. This splendid work reflects this lesser-known side of Liszt.

Видео Liszt - Ave maris stella, S34/1 (Hungarian State Chorus) канала Andrei Cristian Anghel