By EDNA C. HOWARD
Organist and Director of the Choir, Highgate Wesleyan Church
Relayed from St. Mary-Ie-
Bow
T ISZT'S piece is one of a set in which he gives in music his impressions of travel. There are in all three such sets, the first two referring to his wanderings through Switzerland and Italy at various times from 1835 to 1840, when he was in his twenties.
Liszt's early ideas as to pictorial or suggestive music are well indicated in the preface to the first edition of the earliest of the pieces, in which he says: 'Having recently visited many new countries . having felt that the varied aspects of Nature and of the scenes attached thereto did not pass before my eye like vain pictures, but they stirred up in my soul. deep emotions; that there was established between them and myself ... an inexplicable, but certain communication, I have tried to express in music a few of the strongest of my sensations .. As instrumental music progresses, develops, frees itself from its first fetters, it tends to become more and more imbued with that ideality which has marked the perfection of the plastic arts, to become not only a simple combination of sounds, but a poetic language more apt perhaps than poetry itself to express all that within us oversteps the accustomed horizons, everything that escapes analysis, everything that attaches itself to inaccessible depths, imperishable desires, infinite presentiments.....'
The Espousals piece is ' after' the picture by Raphael, in the Brera at Milan, showing the wedding ceremony of Mary and Joseph, with a noble temple in the background.