Hyperion Records

Marling is a village in the South Tyrol (the northernmost part of Italy, bordered by Austria to the east and north) where the Viennese poet Emil Kuh, a friend and biographer of the greater writer Friedrich Hebbel, spent the last years of his life. For Liszt, who had taken minor orders in the Catholic Church in 1865, the poetic persona’s invocation of the church bell’s ‘sacred song’ inspired one of his most beautiful late lieder, Ihr Glocken von Marling. Here, the overtone series of church bells, the way in which their pulsating tones fill the air, become non-resolving seventh and ninth chords in a beautifully lyrical manifestation of Liszt’s tonal sophistication.

from notes by Susan Youens © 2012