Over the course of his career, Liszt wrote several sets of piano pieces, including three collections he entitled Années de pélerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”). The first two Années were published in 1858, although he had composed some of the individual pieces as far back as 1838. They were largely inspired by his travels in Switzerland and Italy in the 1830s and ’40s. The third Année was a product of Liszt’s old age, when he migrated among Rome, Budapest, and Weimar each year. Like many of his piano works from this period, the pieces in this Année display relatively little of the heroic and extroverted virtuosity evident in his earlier piano music; rather, they are distinguished by their austerely religious sensibility as well as their daring harmonic experiments, which inspired generations of later composers.

Liszt borrowed the title of “Sunt lacrimae rerum” from a famous passage in Virgil’s Aeneid, in which the wandering hero Aeneas gazes tearfully at a mural of the Trojan War, which saw the downfall of his home city and the deaths of many of his friends. Liszt used it to honor the memory of the Hungarian revolution of 1848, which was crushed by Austrian military forces. His subtitle is “In the Hungarian mode,” referring to the piece’s unusual scale patterns, which rely heavily on the exotic interval of the augmented second. (Some writers—including Béla Bartók—questioned Liszt’s understanding of Hungarian music, which, they argued, he confused with Gypsy music.)

Liszt composed “Sunt lacrimae rerum” in 1872, and published it in 1883, along with the rest of the third Année. Our manuscript, which was apparently prepared as part of the publi­cation process, is mainly in the hand of a copyist, but it includes corrections and additions by Liszt himself.