Franz Liszt - Dem Andenken Petöfis, S. 195 (audio + sheet music)
A falling recitative-like figure (taken from Liszt's recitation on Jokai's poem "The Dead Poet's Love") gives way to a grazioso e dolce passage falling like a benediction and seeming to token another world before a brief moment of grandioso swagger and falling fff octaves -- Liszt's semaphore for failure and death -- rounded with a muted, serried octave lift to an ethereal rolled chord reaching above the treble clef -- such is Liszt's Dem Andenken Petöfis (To the Memory of Petöfi). It is a curiously quiescent tribute to a poet who might be called Hungary's answer to Byron. If Hungarian were a less esoteric language, Sándor Petöfi (1823-1849) would be recognized as closer to the archetype of the poet as insurrectionary leader and firebrand than Byron. After an early apprenticeship as a struggling writer, Petöfi's first volume of poems, published with the help of Mihály Vörösmarty in 1844, made him famous. With Romantic ardor he declared, "Liberty, love! These two I need. For my love I will sacrifice life, for liberty I will sacrifice my love." He was the ringleader among disaffected youth plotting Hungary's freedom from Austria and not only wrote "Nemzeti Dal" -- often called the Hungarian Marseillaise, with its ringing incitement, "Rise up, Magyar, the country calls! It's 'now or never' what fate befalls..." -- but declaimed it before a raging crowd on the steps of Budapest's National Museum on March 15, 1848, spurring the revolutionary wave already setting Europe alight and bringing Hungarian leaders in Pest to the insurgents' side. For an exhilaratingly short time it seemed the revolution would succeed. Petöfi served as aide-de-camp to General Józef Bem, whose Transylvanian Army consistently won against Hapsburg forces until, answering an urgent appeal from Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, Czar Nicholas I sent 200,000 Russian troops to help crush the insurrection. In the chaos of the battle of Segesvár on July 31, 1849, Petofi disappeared. A body thought to be his could not be positively identified, thereby lending his disappearance the aura of legend. Petofi was more than an agitator and patriot; as a poet he continued to develop in the course of his brief life in unpredictable but imperishable ways that place him shoulder-to-shoulder with such western European Romantics as Shelley, Heine, and Béranger, and kept his verses on the lips of the Hungarian people to the present day. He and Liszt never met. Composed in 1877, Liszt included a slightly expanded version of Dem Andenken Petöfis in the Hungarian Historical Portraits of 1885. (AllMusic) Please take note that the audio AND sheet music ARE NOT mine. Feel free to change the video quality to a minimum of 480p for the best watching experience. Performer: Andrea Bonata (Audivis Astree, 1991) ( • Dem Andenken Petöfis, S. 195 ) Original sheet music: imslp.org/wiki/Dem_Andenken_Pet%C3%B6fis%2C_S.195_(Liszt%2C_Franz) (Schott & Co., no date)
