Franz Liszt composed Via Crucis - The Stations of the Cross - in 1879, near the end of a long life that had passed through romantic celebrity, social scandal, profound religious conversion, and eventual ordination to the minor orders of the Catholic Church. The work is scored for piano (or organ) and soloists and chorus, setting fourteen meditations on the traditional stations that mark the way of Christ's suffering from Pilate's judgment hall to the tomb. Liszt never heard it performed: publishers rejected the manuscript as too strange, too harmonically radical, too unlike anything that could be sold to bourgeois audiences in 1879. It was not published until 1936 and not widely performed until the second half of the twentieth century. It is now recognized as one of his most visionary works.
The stations draw from the Passion narratives of all four Gospels, but Luke's account dominates. Luke 23:26-32 provides the core of the walk to Calvary: Simon of Cyrene compelled to carry the cross, the women of Jerusalem who weep, and Jesus's haunting reply - 'Do not weep for me; weep for yourselves and for your children.' Luke 23:46 gives Liszt his final climax: 'Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.' These are the words of a man entrusting himself entirely to God in the moment of absolute abandonment.
At the heart of the work stands Station IX, which sets Mark 15:34's quotation of Psalm 22:1 - 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' - in music of such stark harmonic daring that it seems to anticipate the expressionism of Schoenberg by three decades. The chord that accompanies the word 'forsaken' is one of the most shocking moments in the entire Liszt catalogue, a combination that refuses resolution, that hangs in the air like an unanswered question.
Between the stations, Liszt incorporates the plainsong hymn 'O Crux, ave, spes unica' - 'Hail, O Cross, our only hope' - which appears in various harmonizations throughout the work, sometimes tender, sometimes anguished, sometimes stripped to bare unison as if the music itself has been crucified. This recurring chant functions as the Via Crucis's spine, the ancient Church's devotion underlying and supporting the more dramatic expressionist passages.
Liszt's late religious style, sometimes called his 'via negativa,' strips away the virtuosic ornamentation of his earlier music in favor of spare textures, long silences, and unconventional harmonies that resist easy resolution. The Via Crucis is the summit of this style. It is music that refuses to make suffering beautiful in a consoling way, that insists on sitting with the pain rather than resolving it prematurely into triumph. The resurrection is not set. The work ends at the tomb.
The refusal to write an Easter conclusion was itself a theological statement. Liszt, deeply formed by the Franciscan and Jesuit traditions of Passion meditation, understood that the stations were about accompanying Christ to death, not bypassing the cross on the way to glory. The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola, which Liszt knew well, structured meditation in precisely this way: dwelling with each moment of the Passion before moving to the next, allowing the meditant to enter fully into Christ's suffering.
That the work was rejected as too radical by publishers of 1879 speaks volumes about the gap between institutional religion and genuine spiritual art. The same publishers were content to sell sentimental religious pieces that offered comfort without cost. Via Crucis offered cost without easy comfort, asking the listener to walk all fourteen stations and arrive, exhausted, at a sealed tomb. The subsequent century of wars, genocides, and mass suffering has made Liszt's Via Crucis seem not strange but prophetic - music appropriate to a world in which the question 'My God, why have you forsaken me?' is never far from human lips.