The article does not take into account Liszt’s entire choral output for choir, but only the secular songs for male chorus, thus excluding masses, psalms and other religious pieces. The repertoire briefly analysed in this article has been very much neglected by critics, who often cannot find the original scores, since these pieces were not republished after their first editions in the Nineteenth century.
The authors propose to begin to look at this repertoire following a subdivision according to the themes of the poems set to music. Some songs deal with patriotic matters: poets such as Ernst Moritz Arndt, Georg Herwegh and Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben praise Liberty, High-mindedness and the Motherland in songs full of sincere enthusiasm. Another group of songs is written for worker choruses; among these we find perhaps the first song of the class struggle, Le forgeron. Typical themes of Romanticism are also present: lyrics in praise of nature like Saatengrün, or flights into the realm of dreams as Der Gang um Mitternacht (“Ich schreite mit dem Geist der Mitternacht” – “I walk together with the Midnight Spirit”) and into the world of fairy-tales as in Uhland’s poem “Die alten Sagen kunden / Von einem Schatz im Rhein” (“Old tales tell about a treasure at the bottom of the Rhine”). The authors maintain that the choral songs written in the Forties could help us to understand the deep changes in this period in Liszt’s life, in his mind and his attitude to poetry, thus inviting us to pursue further study of these works.