Who could accomplish anything after Beethoven — the resigned sentence is Franz Schubert’s. The correspondence of content and form in Beethoven’s works was too complete for the inherited canon of genres simply to be continued. A new perspective was offered by the approach promoted above all by Berlioz: to write programme music instead of absolute music, that is, to incorporate extramusical ideas into the composition and its formal course. The young Liszt too soon abandoned the hope of harvesting fields already reaped by giants and became a dedicated follower of the new direction — with a vision of programmatic music that differed in some respects from that of the composer of the Symphonie fantastique.
The second year of the Années de pèlerinage leads to Italy and draws its impulses from the visual arts and from poetry. Raphael’s depiction of the marriage of the Virgin prompted the Sposalizio. In Florence Liszt saw Michelangelo’s sculptures in the Medici Chapel; so moved was he by the figure of Lorenzo de’ Medici on his tomb and by the Night that he wrote two compositions on them, Il Penseroso and La notte, which share the same musical material. At Liszt’s wish the statue of Lorenzo, together with a poem by Michelangelo, adorned the title page of the first edition.
Il Penseroso is in C sharp minor — since Beethoven’s so-called Moonlight Sonata, whose first movement he is said to have improvised at the deathbed of a friend, one of the typical keys of the funeral march. There follow the Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa and the three Petrarch sonnets, originally songs, and finally the Fantasia quasi Sonata Après une lecture du Dante, at almost twenty minutes the central piece of the cycle. The late La notte, built on Il Penseroso, closes the programme.
The instrument has a history with Liszt. From the 1840s Eduard Steingraeber looked after the master’s pianos in concert and had to fit new strings during the intervals when they could not withstand the vigour of the young piano revolutionary. In 1873 he built the grand piano played here, its case matched to the rococo style of the concert hall in the Steingraeber house in Bayreuth: state of the art for its day, with a cast iron plate, correspondingly strong strings and a repetition action. During his many stays in Bayreuth Liszt played this instrument.
The recordings were made on 2 April 2000 and from 2 to 5 April 2002 in the Himmelfahrtskirche in Munich-Sendling. The hybrid SACD runs to 71:40 in stereo and 5.1 surround; the booklet has 32 pages in German and English.