Annees de Pelerinage 3rd year

If one were to characterize the third volume of the Anné de Pèlerinage in two words, they would be ‘religion’ and ‘depression’. And while much can be said about the first, one can mostly speculate about the latter. The premature deaths of his son Daniel and daughter Blandine may well have caused his depsair; so could the thwarted marriage of Princess Carolyne Wittgenstein in Rome on top of his inability to realise his artistic ambitions concerning the ‘Music of the future’ in the small minded Weimar during the 1850’s. Fact is that on his fifty first birthday Liszt was entering the blackest and most troubled phase of his life.