"ORPHEUS," SYMPHONIC POEM (No. 4) [72]
Orphée, composed in 1854, was conceived by Liszt at a time when he was engaged in conducting rehearsals of Gluck's opera "Orpheus" for performance at Weimar, and the completed symphonic poem was first played there, as a prelude to the opera of Gluck, on February 16,1854. The score contains a preface by Liszt which forms an admirable commentary on the spirit and temper of the music:
"One day I had to conduct Gluck's 'Orpheus.' During the rehearsals it was well-nigh impossible for me to refrain from abstracting my imagination from the point of view—touching and sublime in its simplicity—from which the great master had considered his subject, to travel in thought back to that Orpheus whose name soars so majestically and harmoniously over the most poetic of Greek myths. I saw again, in my mind's eye, an Etruscan vase in the Louvre, representing the first poet-musician, draped in a starry robe, his brow encircled by a mystically royal fillet, his lips parted and breathing forth divine words and songs, and his fine, long, taper fingers energetically striking the strings of his lyre. I thought to see round about him, as if I had seen him in the flesh, wild beasts listening in ravishment; man's brutal instincts quelled to silence; stones softening; hearts harder still, perhaps, bedewed with a miserly and burning tear; warbling birds and babbling water-falls interrupting their own melodies; laughter and pleasures listening with reverence to those accents that revealed to Humanity the beneficent power of art, its glorious illumination, its civilizing harmony.
"With the purest of morals preached to it, taught by the most sublime dogmas, enlightened by the most shining beacons of science, informed by the philosophic reasonings of the intellect, surrounded by the most refined of civilizations, Humanity to-day, as formerly and always, preserves in its breast its instincts of ferocity, brutality, and sensuality, which it is the mission of art to soften, sweeten, and ennoble. To-day, as formerly and always, Orpheus, that is to say, Art, should spread his melodious waves, his chords vibrating, like a sweet and irresistible light, over those conflicting elements which rend each other and bleed in the soul of every one of us, as they do in the entrails of every society. Orpheus bewails Eurydice—Eurydice, that emblem of the Ideal engulfed by evil and suffering, whom he is allowed to snatch from the monsters of Erebus, to lead forth from the depths of Cimmerian darkness, but whom he cannot, alas! keep for his own on earth. May at least those barbarous times never return, when furious passions, like drunken and unbridled mænads, revenged themselves upon art's disdain of their coarse, sensual delights by felling it with their murderous thyrsi and their stupid fury.
"Had it been given me completely to formulate my thought, I could have wished to render the serenely civilizing character of the songs that radiate from every work of art; their gentle energy, their august empery, their sonority that fills the soul with noble ecstasy, their undulation, soft as breezes from Elysium, their gradual uprising like clouds of incense, their diaphanous and azure ether enveloping the world and the whole universe as with an atmosphere, as with a transparent garment of ineffable and mysterious Harmony."[73]
Mr. Philip Hale has thus described the music in which Liszt crystallized his fancies:
"... Harp arpeggios are thrown over soft horn tones for a prelude, and then Orpheus sings of the might of his art.... The song of Orpheus becomes more intimate in its appeal [Lento ... English horn, oboe.] The passage ends, ... and a short phrase is given to the first violin. Some hear, in this phrase, a call, 'Eurydice!' These themes are used alternately until there is a climax with the entrance of the first and solemn Orpheus theme, fortissimo. [Later] the Orpheus song is again intoned in all its majesty. There is a hush, and the Eurydice theme is heard. The 'mystical end' is brought by an alternate use of strings and wood-wind instruments in the Orpheus song."