The St. Stanislaus Oratorio of Franz Liszt

Among the unfinished works of Franz Liszt is an oratorio on the life of Stanislaus, the patron saint of Poland. It was Liszt's last great project, a kind of "Nunc dimittis" which occupied him more than did any other composition of his final years. Now a critical edition of the extant music and libretto is available as volume 26 in the series Recent Researches in the Music of the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.

Liszt worked on the oratorio intermittently throughout the last 12 years of his life and finished half of it before his death in Summer 1886. Until now, most of the music remained unpublished and unperformed because, at Liszt's death, the manuscripts were widely scattered. The materials have since found their way, manuscript by manuscript, to Weimar, where they were collected first by the Liszt Archive and after World War II by the Goethe and Schiller Archive. Completed scores exist for the first and the last of the four scenes Liszt projected for the oratorio, and they can be read and performed as self-standing pieces. All that is missing in these two sections is the orchestration for the aria sung by the bishop's mother, which is published in the edition in the composer's own reduction for voice and piano.

Opening of Scene 4, the orchestral interlude, "Salve Polonia."

The story of the medieval bishop Stanislaus, who dared to rebuke King Boleslaus II for the evil of his reign and who consequently died a martyr's death in 1079, appealed to Liszt for political reasons. It was a tale of the church's necessary independence from the state--one of the great liberal-Catholic enterprises of his day--coupled with equally liberal-Catholic expressions of Polish nationalism. In Liszt's version of the legend, the king repents after slaying Stanislaus. He abdicates, undertakes a penitential pilgrimage, and dies years later as an anonymous monk in a foreign country. The final chorus hails a brighter future for Poland with a borrowed melody, which has been adopted as the Polish national anthem in the twentieth century. The deliverance of the nation is explicitly linked to the king's submission to the church's spiritual authority, while the bishop recognizes and adamantly defends the civil authority of the king. This message resonates today in Poland, where many in the Catholic clergy played an important and independent role in liberalizing the state during the 1980s.

The first scene of St. Stanislaus, composed in 1874-75, presents the cries and complaints of the oppressed citizens of Krakow in a style reminiscent of Liszt's earlier oratorios, Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth (1862) and Christus (1866). The synthesis of church modality and late-Romantic chromaticism evident in the earlier works is even more striking here. The fourth scene dates from the 1880s and opens new windows onto the peculiar and sometimes startlingly dissonant soundscape of Liszt's late style. The composer of Nuages gris (1881) captures both the anguished remorse of the murderer-king in a setting of Psalm 129, "Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord," and the bittersweet stasis of the chorus's final acclamation of the nation's future, "Hail Poland!" But before the psalm and before the acclamation there is a flamboyant orchestral rhapsody on Polish national melodies, which in the drama serves a summarizing function similar to that of the interlude which precedes the final scene of St. Elisabeth. While fragments of St. Stanislaus have been known in rare, nineteenth-century publications, this edition will make available to performers and scholars all the extant music Liszt intended for this final major work.

Paul Munson teaches music history at Union University in Jackson, Tennessee.