Années de pèlerinage: Au bord d'une source

There is a moment in this piece where the piano seems to forget it is a piano. Liszt conjures the sound of water so completely — through rapid, cascading arpeggios in the right hand rippling over a gently sustained left — that the listener loses track of the instrument and simply hears a stream. This is one of the "Years of Pilgrimage" pieces, written during Liszt's travels through Switzerland, and it carries the weightlessness of a man who has stopped walking and knelt beside moving water. The tempo is unhurried, almost suspended, with dynamics that rarely push above mezzo-forte. There is no drama here, no grand statement — only a sustained state of quiet wonder. The emotional texture is contemplative without being melancholy, luminous without being triumphant. It belongs to late afternoon in a forest, or to the first minutes of waking before the day asserts itself. Where much of Liszt's catalog announces itself with bravado, this piece whispers, and that restraint is what makes it devastating. For anyone who has ever stood at the edge of something natural and felt briefly dissolved by it, this music is that feeling rendered in sound.