Liszt's Concerto Pathétique
"Concerto Pathétique" is a supernatural vision-tale framed as a first-person account of a mystical experience during a concert in the winter of 1906. The narrator, attending a performance of two well-known pianists, is drawn into rapt attention by the program's centerpiece: Liszt's two-piano *Concerto Pathétique*, a turbulent tone-poem marked by violent dramatic outbursts interrupted by passages of transcendent, otherworldly melody. Distracted at first by mundane details—restless neighbors, bobbing heads, a shaft of winter light striking a jewel—the narrator is suddenly transported out of the concert hall and into a visionary landscape glimpsed nowhere on earth. This landscape is a somber, twilight desert of gray, undulating sand, lit by no sun, moon, or star—a Cimmerian half-light suggesting a realm of purgatorial punishment. It is populated not by whole beings but by fragments: disembodied arms clawing for cruelty or gold, withered legs, backs bent under invisible burdens, and a chorus of grotesque, winged faces cycling between leering malice and fading grayness. This is revealed as a land where disembodied pain dwells—where regret, shame, remorse, and anguish take on ghostly form, straining toward an unreachable earthly repentance before dissolving back into insubstantiality. Across this desert flees a young woman, barely more than a girl, beautiful despite a face disfigured by grief and terror. She wears a nun's black cloak, unfastened and clutched with one trembling hand, and her cropped pale-gold curls—damp with fear—mark her as an escapee from cloistered life, her complexion bearing the marble pallor of convent confinement. Her eyes, dark ethereal blue, hold a mixture of pain, passion, and regret. Though she opens her mouth as sand-monsters drift toward her path, no sound emerges: she is mute. As she runs, a fragment of music of unearthly sweetness rings out across the waste, and in its wake a pale, distant radiance in the shape of a cross appears in the sky—faint, cold, and remote, "a shadow's shadow." The narrator first suspects the melody is somehow identical with the woman's own beauty, since both stir the same chords of feeling, sweetness fused with sorrow. But this proves mistaken: the music emanates from elsewhere, and though it seems to live perpetually in the woman's heart—her lips straining silently to shape its sounds—it paradoxically keeps her forever excluded from the cross's radiance. Each recurrence of the melody quickens her flight, and the desert begins to transform: a shimmering brightness resolves into a garden of small blue and white flowers under a resplendent sun, alive with iris-winged insects. This, the narrator senses, is the true home of the music—a place of love and vital fullness. As the woman nears it, the cross's light withdraws further into remoteness, "a wan gold shadow of exquisite remoteness," while the garden's glow intensifies into a dazzling blue radiance. Under this new light the small flowers swell into enormous, satin-soft lilies exhaling a languorous, seductive fragrance—"the intangible soul of pleasure." When the melody sounds again, the giant lily-buds burst open to reveal, in place of pistil and stamen, the white glowing bodies of women with flame-bright hair, dancing an amorous measure. The narrator now understands the music's true source: not innocence but sensual seduction—the twining of arms, swaying torsos, and interlaced limbs of these lily-women, their wanton loveliness and vital, amorous longing translated into sound. The cross recedes further into the sky, a cold and frowning remoteness withdrawing from the scene, while the garden's glamour overtakes the fleeing woman. The sand-monsters that had blocked her fall away; hope and courage light her face; she casts off her convent cloak entirely, and a blue lily leans to enfold her as she reaches to grasp it. At the very instant of consummation, catastrophe interrupts: a thunderous rush of wings signals the descent of a horde of blackish, green-winged monsters that blot out the sky, forming a solid wall of writhing heads and shutting the garden from view. These creatures seize her and sweep her violently backward, away from the garden entirely, carrying her at tremendous speed across a second, harsher landscape—a bleak, sterile expanse of black granite periodically lit by the fierce glare of whirling swords that form the gate to a realm of night. Here the swarm lifts her wholly off the earth, suspending her amid overlapping depths of wings above, below, and on every side. In one instant when the fluttering mass parts, sword-light streaks across her face, revealing its white horror and her fear-dampened curls. Then more monsters rush in, the earth and air shuddering with the roar of wings like the sound of many waters, until the whole host sweeps away into an indistinct realm beyond—a place without measurable time or space. The vision closes on the granite land restored to loneliness and silence, its stillness broken only by the sword-gate's ceaseless swinging, which streaks the rocks with fleeting ribbons of light—leaving the woman's ultimate fate, and the meaning of her thwarted flight between damnation, temptation, and unreachable grace, suspended and unresolved.
By Edna Worthley Underwood · First published 1911 · Genre: Supernatural, Fantasy, Gothic