…Thy contrasted lake,
With the wild world I dwell in, is a thing
Which warns me, with its stillness, to forsake
Earth’s troubled waters for a purer spring.
These lines from Lord Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage form the poetic caption for Franz Liszt’s Au lac de Wallenstadt (“At Lake Wallenstadt”). Following the exalted La chapelle de Guillaume Tell, with its distant Alpine horn calls, Au lac de Wallenstadt is the second movement of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”), a three-volume cycle of 26 pieces for solo piano. The title of the collection is a reference to Goethe’s novel of artistic self-realization, Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.
During the 1830s, Franz Liszt embraced the romantic life of the medieval Troubadours. While in a relationship with the Countess Marie d’Agoult, Liszt wandered throughout the countryside of Switzerland and Italy, where he visited “places consecrated by history and poetry,” and found the “phenomena of nature” to be deeply stirring. One of these places was Lake Wallenstadt in eastern Switzerland. In her memoirs, d’Agoult recalled, “Franz wrote for me there a melancholy harmony, imitative of the sigh of the waves and the cadence of oars, which I have never been able to hear without weeping.”
Set in a warm, soothing A-flat major, Au lac de Wallenstadt is a serene atmospheric tone painting.
Here is Lazar Berman’s landmark 1977 recording:
Recordings
- Liszt: Années de pèlerinage, Lazar Berman Amazon
Featured Image: “Bei Weesen am Walensee, Schweiz” (1852), Johann Gottfried Steffan