Virgil's Aeneid follows its hero Aeneas's life until the very the end; Liszt was obviously anticipating a likewise end to his own life, looking back and forward at the same time to his ancestral country of Hungary with an almost homesick melancholy. Whilst Aeneas remembers Árgos during the last moments of his life, James Joyce in Finnegans Wake followed Mr. Earwicker’s long journey through the night; and so did Hermann Broch who followed none other than Virgil through the last eighteen hours of Virgil’s life in The Death of Virgil. Joyce makes the point that our auditory sense is active when asleep which seems to allow music coming to the ears of someone sleeping. The great modern composer Jean Barraqué thought very highly of Broch's book, at one point saying that he would devote the rest of his life to its musical realization. And finally we find biographer Pierantonio Serassi describing for us the funeral of Torquato Tasso. Goethe—who had been on Liszt's mind a lot—gave Liszt the title of his grand cycle, the years of pilgrimage. Liszt knew Goethe's play Torquato Tasso; he had written his second symphonic poem Tasso: Lamento e Trionfo as overture for it. Trois odes funèbres, then, combines more than most composers could fit into a 35-minute piece in three movements. The artistic, literary and religious, the historic and political underpinnings would be more than enough for a Wagnerian four-hour opera. It's all here, love, life and death, war and peace, poetry and history, faith and loss; Michelangelo's visuals of the Cappelle Medicee would be an opera stage as grand as could be imagined. And Aeneas would take us back to the time before the founding of Rome and across the Mediterranean Sea and his home of Árgos. Goethe and Serassi and their hero Torquato Tasso, Virgil and his hero Aeneas, the Medici family and poetry by Michelangelo himself, almost two-thousand years in a story with multiple simultaneous plots and angles. Maybe an opera of life, death and art was on Liszt's mind; not a surprise when we know that Liszt thought very highly of Richard Wagner and supported him as best he could for a long time.

On page five of the score of the second ode, La notte, it looks like Liszt might have taken the Virgil quote from Book X of the Aeneid a little bit out of context; the text of the quote in the original is (the score only quotes the last four words, marked in red): Sternitur infelix alieno volnere caelumque aspicit et dulcis moriens reminiscitur Árgos Here are two translations, one in rhyme and one in prose: ...looking upward to the light, and dreaming of dear Árgos as he died. Unhappy man, he fell to a wound meant for another, and dying, gazing at the sky, remembered sweet Árgos. However, both themes of the third ode are anticipated here: the idea that the poet or composer remembers his homeland with kindness during his last moments and the fervent hope that—not unlike Tasso—his work might be more revered and better understood after his passing. Serassi's description of Torquato Tasso's funeral was placed ahead of the music in the score, defining the overall mood as somber and wistful. The many influences and aspects, the elements and thoughts as well as feelings, make Trois odes funèbres a complex and multi-layered meditation on life and death, on art and its expression, on looking to origin and destination at the same time. While Trois odes funèbres is a work of music, it is also art that comes from other arts and is unthinkable and inaccessible without considering literature, the visual arts, religion, regret and hope, praying and solitude, being celebrated and disregarded at once.

Caro m'è 'l sonno, e più l'esser di sasso, Mentre che 'l danno e la vergogna dura; Non veder, non sentir m'è gran ventura; Però non mi destar, deh, parla basso. (Michelangelo Buonarroti) Muoiono le citt'a, muoiono i regni; Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba; E l'uomo d'esser mortal par che si sdegni. Death is the lot of cities and of States; Pomp, luxury, 'neath sand and grass do lie, Yet man, it seems, is wroth that he must die. (Torquato Tasso)

p.o. box 30122 tucson, arizona 85751 +1 520 326 4400 fax +1 520 326 3333