He visited the Rheinfall near Schaffhausen, rowed across Lake Walenstadt, and climbed Mt. Rigi: in 1835-36 Franz Liszt traveled extensively across Switzerland in the company of his lover, the French Countess Marie d’Agoult, with whom he had fled Paris. And Liszt expressed the diverse impressions he gathered from this period in musical form as well, namely, in the first volume of his “Années de Pèlerinage” (“Years of Pilgrimage”). On 24 November Andreas Haefliger will perform all nine pieces of volume one, taking us on a musical tour of Switzerland’s Alpine landscape.

An outright scandal preceded Liszt’s years of travel in Switzerland. Toward the end of 1832 he became acquainted with Countess Marie d’Agoult in Paris. Six years Liszt’s senior, she had been born into the French aristocracy and thus belonged to an entirely different social sphere. And she was married to a French officer, Charles d’Agoult, with whom she had two daughters. Even so, both she and Liszt began an affair: at first they would meet in secret at Liszt’s home (to which she jokingly referred as the “rat hole”), but soon it became socially impossible to keep up appearances. So the lovers abandoned Paris in 1835, taking separate routes, and met up in Basel. They continued to travel together to Geneva, where they eventually took lodgings. Three children resulted from their years of cohabitation, but the relationship broke up by the end of the 1830s.

Artistically speaking, Liszt’s Swiss years were remarkably productive. The absence of hectic concert engagements gave him the leisure to devote his energy to composition. Although the first version he had published as “Album d’un Voyageur” (1840–42) would be withdrawn a decade later, Liszt included a revised form of this musical travel diary for piano within the three-volume “Années de Pèlerinage” (1855−61). Along with the great B minor Sonata, this work ranks among his most significant compositions for piano. 

The first volume of the “Années de Pèlerinage” is dedicated to Switzerland. From the gentle rustling of the spring in “Au Bord d’une Source,” the tempest in “Orage,” and pastoral shepherd melodies to the overlapping waves of picturesque Lake Walenstadt and the bells of Geneva, Liszt evokes a wealth of varied sound worlds with extraordinary pianistic nuance. Literary inspirations also play into the music. It wasn’t just the well-known William Tell Chapel but Schiller’s drama about the legendary hero that inspired him as well. And the so-called “Vallée d’Obermann,” in which Liszt alludes to the protagonist of a best-selling novel of the time by Étienne Pivert de Senancours, exists only as a literary place name. The “Années de Pèlerinage” marry Liszt’s concrete travel impressions with poetic legends in a wonderfully suggestive way, as Andreas Haefliger will demonstrate in his recital on 24 November. The program will also pair this sonic depiction of Switzerland with Franz Schubert’s thoughtful Sonata in G major.