【钢琴】李斯特 - 2首圣斯坦尼斯洛斯波罗乃兹 S.519

Franz Liszt - Deux Polonaises de l'oratorio St. Stanislas, S519
Performer: Leslie Howard

Saint Elisabeth of Hungary was certainly an obvious choice for Liszt. So too was the life of Jesus for a man who, whatever his personal and public shortcomings, has to be credited with the sincerest religious devotion. The life of the Polish saint Stanislaus seems to have been taken up partly to please the Polish Princess zu Sayn-Wittgenstein and, apart from three pieces and a setting of Psalm 129, ‘De profundis’, never developed into the finished oratorio, even though Liszt worked on it intermittently for a dozen years (between 1873 and 1885). From the inclusion of the earlier Salve Polonia as an interlude, and from the use of some of the same material in the second of the Polonaises, it seems that Liszt was going to use national melodies to bind the work together in the same way that he employed them in St Elisabeth, but the setting of ‘De profundis’ is a stark and serious affair akin to the style of the late piano pieces, and it is hard to see how the elements might have fused together. In any event, Liszt published Salve Polonia in versions for orchestra, piano and piano duet in 1884, and the Psalm appeared in one version in 1883, so he may have known for a long time that he would not finish the oratorio. The rest remained in his desk, but the two Polonaises were complete in versions for solo piano—it cannot be said that they are transcriptions in the sense that there is no orchestral version of them extant—so their only place is amongst the bone fide works for piano, remembering the while that Liszt never revised them for publication.