Cujus Animam (after Rossini: Stabat Mater; arr. trombone and organ) S.679

When Liszt abandoned his career as a touring virtuoso to become kapellmeister to the impoverished Duchy of Saxe-Weimar (however rich in its associations with Goethe and Schiller), his scope as a composer broadened enormously. Conducting the Duchy's small orchestra—which Liszt sought relentlessly to expand—he quickly mastered the art of orchestration and began to conceive works orchestrally with assurance and a startling degree of originality. Prompted by the presence of the brilliant young organists Alexander Wilhelm Gottschalg, Julius Reubke, and Alexander Winterberger, Liszt began to compose prolifically for the organ and he made tours of the organs throughout Thuringia and absorbed the literature of the instrument, particularly the works of Bach, who had served at Weimar 140 years before. His first organ works, the Fantasy and Fugue on "Ad nos, ad salutarem undam" (1850) and the Fantasy and Fugue on B-A-C-H (1855), are his colossal grandest, the former rivaling the piano sonata as his single greatest keyboard work and the latter standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the works of his old age as a harbinger of twentieth century harmony. Though he never mastered the pedal technique to be a virtuoso organist, Liszt nevertheless challenged the conservative approach to the instrument current at the time, prompting his young protégés to more adventurous registrations in the application of tone color and toward a fuller use of the organ's resources. After hearing Gottschalg perform Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor, Liszt exclaimed, "Surely Bach did not play his works in such a manner; he, whose registrations were so admired by his contemporaries! When you are playing on a three-manual instrument, why should the other two manuals be ignored?" In this spirit several of his later transcriptions of his own works are frankly experimental, for instance, the 1883 reworking of Sposlizio, from the Italian book of the Années de pèlerinage, for organ and women's voices. Among these, a reworking for organ and trombone of his 1847 piano transcription of the "Cujus animam" from Rossini's Stabat Mater is an equivocal curiosity. Composed, with the Hosannah for organ and trombone, in the early 1860s as a favor to his close friend, copyist, librarian, factotum, and trombonist Eduard Grosse, Rossini's vocal line has been straightforwardly given to the trombone, while the magnificent piano realization, reliant on pedal-held crossed-hands effects to project the melody embedded in its accompaniment, proved unsuitable to the organ and has been adapted as a simple accompanied solo.

© Adrian Corleonis, Rovi