Derek Wang: Liszt on Pilgrimage

Illuminated by poetry and letters, Liszt's musical travelogue comes alive as an inner quest.

In 1835, Franz Liszt eloped with the Countess Marie d’Agoult, leaving Paris for Switzerland in a voyage of self-discovery modeled on Lord Byron. His First Year of Pilgrimage charts a young artist’s reckoning with landscape, literature, and memory, with the brooding “Vallée d’Obermann” at its heart, reaching toward the inexpressible.

“Could I embody and unbosom now / That which is most within me…”—so Childe Harold, the melancholy voyager of Byron’s poem, sounds the depths of his own consciousness, and laments his inability to bring himself to the point of expression. Liszt prefaces his own “Vallée d’Obermann” with this stanza, posing the question: how do you find the words, or the music, to express the inexpressible? While Byron takes language to its breaking point as his words strain toward the ineffable effects of music, Liszt works the other way around, testing the limits of music as it strives toward the eloquence and clarity of language.

In this concert, acclaimed pianist and communicator Derek Wang fuses words and music, illuminating Liszt’s Swiss Year of Pilgrimage with readings of Byron’s poetry and Liszt’s own letters. Derek was awarded Fourth Prize at the 2024 Hastings International Piano Concerto Competition, which follows awards at the 2022 Liszt Utrecht Competition (Second Prize) and the 2021 New York Liszt Competition (First Prize).