About this Piece

In February 1847, Franz Liszt met Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein while giving concerts in Kyiv. Already separated from the husband to whom she had been married when only 17, von Sayn-Wittgenstein fell in love with the pianist, who was also at a personal crossroads. Weary from almost a decade of constant touring, Liszt completed some further engagements and then abandoned the public concert stage as a pianist, staying with von Sayn-Wittgenstein on her Ukrainian estate from the fall of 1847 until January 1848, when the couple left for Weimar.

Years before, the Grand Duke Carl Alexander had offered Liszt the post of Kapellmeister-in-Extraordinary, an appealingly grandiose music directorship that Liszt’s relentless touring precluded accepting. Now Liszt wanted to devote himself more to composition. Weimar offered him an orchestra and an opera house, and a kindred spirit in the Grand Duke, with whom Liszt hoped to create an “Athens of the North.” This dream went unfulfilled, but Liszt wrote some of his finest music during the 13 years he spent in Weimar.

In Weimar Liszt found himself particularly close to the spirit of J.S. Bach, who had lived and worked in the city more than a century before as an employee of Duke Wilhelm Ernst, a direct ancestor of Carl Alexander. Many of Bach’s organ works were published for the first time in 1844, and among the earliest works that Liszt completed in Weimar were transcriptions for piano of six of Bach’s Preludes and Fugues for organ.

The Variations on “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen” is another Bach-inspired work, one that began as a relatively simple prelude for solo piano written in 1859. The text for the chorus begins, “Tears, complaints, care, fear, anguish, and stress are the bitter bread of Christians,” and when Liszt’s daughter Blandine died in 1862 he expanded the prelude into an extended elegy, a set of 30 variations using the sinking chromatic line much as Bach would have in a passacaglia, a Baroque form of continuous variation.

Liszt incorporates some of the soprano part of Bach’s chorus in a syncopated form in the sixth variation, after which he begins a free elaboration, leading to a central section of more extroverted technical display. After the demonstrative 30th variation, a wayward recitative ushers in the chorale tune from the final movement of the cantata, “Was Gott tut, das ist wohl getan” (What God Does Is Done Well). So, like the cantata, Liszt’s variations reverse the sighing sorrow of their beginning, ending with hopeful affirmation.

—John Henken