Hyperion Records

Meyerbeer the song-writer has only recently begun to emerge from eclipse, thanks largely to the efforts of imaginative accompanists like Geoffrey Parsons, but in their day Meyerbeer’s songs were sung in the salons throughout Europe, and dramatic numbers like Le moine, which tells of a monk’s crisis of faith, were extremely popular. Liszt follows all three verses of Meyerbeer’s song—the monk alternately, and ever more ecstatically, extolling the pleasures of the world and the gratification of the self, and then begging for help from Our Lady. Liszt mirrors the height of the monk’s self-indulgence with demonic pyrotechnics, and renders the prayer even more austere than in the song. It is not too difficult to imagine that the subject matter had some bearing on Liszt’s lifestyle at the time. (Incidentally, many catalogues suggest that Liszt’s piece contains two further melodies by Meyerbeer. This is not so. The original edition is marked ‘suivi de deux mélodies’, referring no doubt to the possible future issue of other transcriptions from the set of 12 Mélodies that Meyerbeer had recently published, but these transcriptions were never made.)

from notes by Leslie Howard © 1993