Recording scheduled for 2025

Élégie d’après Liszt for baritone and orchestra is part of a triptych created in collaboration with composers Joan Magrané and Raquel García Tomás. While always respecting each composer’s individual sound world, we sought connections that would unify our works, both technically and poetically, while also linking them to Verdi’s Requiem, which was performed immediately after our pieces on the night of the premiere.

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To engage in dialogue with Verdi’s theme—death—we turned to Catalan Baroque poetry, a period that may be little known but is of great aesthetic richness and highly evocative from a musical perspective. In the case of Élégie d’après Liszt, the selected text is a fragment from a long religious poem by Agustí Eura, titled In "Memòria d'una sepultura", marked by a distinctly macabre tone.

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The work is also connected to another musical reference to death, this time from the late 19th century: the final creative period of Franz Liszt. During this phase, the Hungarian composer underwent a radical shift in his aesthetic, distancing himself from the Romantic language of the time and moving toward a musical conception that anticipated the dissolution of tonality in the 20th century. Among the most striking pieces from this period—besides Nuages gris—are his two "Lugubre Gondola" for solo piano, inspired, according to his letters, by a premonition of Wagner’s death, which occurred just weeks later.

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In this work, I have adapted the first of the two Lugubre Gondola, incorporating Eura’s text, which vividly describes the progressive decomposition of a corpse. From a musical standpoint, orchestration becomes the driving force behind this “journey.” The piece begins with a more literal approach to Liszt’s original work and gradually transforms into a distorted vision of musical time. This time appears to waver between movement and stillness, as if it were decomposing alongside the body described in the poem. As the piece progresses, the sonic material disintegrates: the texture fractures, the harmonic syntax fades, and the discourse fragments until it is suspended in an inert space, where the music seems frozen in a spectral stasis.