Franz Liszt, Volume I by Alan Walker

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Prologue

Liszt’s Family Background

The standard accounts of Liszt’s life usually claim that it was Georg, the grandfather, who first Magyarized the family name from List to Liszt. List betrayed the family’s Germanic origins; it was, and still is, a fairly common German name. Moreover, it is pronounced “Lischt” by the Magyars. By inserting the “z,” Georg is usually credited with avoiding the German pronunciation, adopting a rare family name (few other families in Hungary in the eighteenth century were called Liszt), and, at the same time, linking the word to one of the basic nouns in the Magyar tongue: the word “liszt” in Magyar means “flour.”

Liszt was Hungarian in thought and word and deed.

As a boy, Adam’s chief love was music, for which he possessed a genuine talent. From his prodigiously active father he picked up some knowledge of the various instruments, including the piano and the cello, and he dreamed of becoming a virtuoso. We find him in Eisenstadt, sometime before 1790, playing the cello in the Esterházys’ summer orchestra under the direction of Haydn. In later life he was fond of telling how he had regularly played cards with the great composer on these visits to the summer palace. Ninety years later, Liszt wrote, "My father often told me of his dealings with Haydn , and the daily card parties he made up with him . "

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Book One: The Young Prodigy, 1811–1829

Childhood in Hungary

Adam Liszt was well qualified to instruct his son in the rudiments of piano playing, ... There was a special affinity with Beethoven. Whenever Liszt was asked as a boy what he wanted to be when he grew up, he pointed to the wall where a portrait of Beethoven was hanging. “Ein solcher,” he used to reply. “Like him.”

As a special treat for his seventh birthday, on October 22, 1818, the small boy was allowed to travel with his father to Lackenbach, where Adam had some business with a wealthy merchant called Ruben Hirschler. The daughter of this merchant, Fanni, had just been given a piano, recently arrived from Vienna. Adam requested the girl to play something for his young son, who, he explained, also loved music. When the lad heard the playing he could say nothing, his eyes filled with tears, and he threw himself weeping into the arms of his father. This scene so moved the elderly merchant that he gave the piano to the boy. It was a wonderful birthday gift. Hirschler’s gesture created a warm friendship between the two families. The Liszts often used to drive over from Raiding to Lackenbach (about half an hour’s journey) and spend their Sunday afternoons in the Hirschler household.

Another family with whom the Liszts were friendly was the Frankenburgs. ... Frau Frankenburg, enthralled by the phenomenal progress of “Franzi,” wanted to put Adolf to the piano as well. But he tells us that his childish mind was frightened by the huge keyboard, because he thought that innumerable tiny demons lived in it and would shoot up from the ebony keys to bite into his fingers. Instead of the piano, he eventually settled for the guitar, which appeared less threatening.

What Liszt admired in Tzigane music was its improvisatory , impulsive nature. ... (About Tzigane musician, especially the Romany violinist János Bihari) His musical cascades fell in rainbow profusion , or glided along in a soft murmur ....

(Liszt's first meeting with Czerny documented by Czerny himself) He was a pale, sickly-looking child who, while playing, swayed about on the stool as if drunk, so that I often thought he would fall to the floor. His playing was also quite irregular, untidy, confused, and he had so little idea of fingering that he threw his fingers quite arbitrarily all over the keyboard. But that notwithstanding, I was astonished at the talent which Nature had bestowed on him. He played something which I gave him to sight-read, to be sure, like a pure “natural”; but for that very reason, one saw that Nature herself had formed a pianist. It was just the same when, at his father’s request, I gave him a theme on which to improvise. Without the slightest knowledge of harmony, he still brought a touch of genius to his rendering.

Vienna, 1821–1823

(About Liszt's teacher Salieri) Hanging over Salieri for the last thirty years of his life was the slander of his having “poisoned” Mozart from feelings of professional jealousy. ... Moscheles, who visited Salieri in hospital during his last illness, relates that he tearfully protested his innocence to the last.

He, like Czerny, taught Franzi free of charge, evidence of a rarely reported aspect of his character.

(In his letter to Prince Esterházy on Liszt’s behalf) The young man has been making extraordinary progress in singing, in figured bass, and in deciphering full scores of different genres, three disciplines in which I drill him during each lesson in order to introduce him gradually to composition and in order to maintain his sense of good taste.

Paris and the First World Tours

(When Liszt and his father presented themeselves at the Paris Conservatoire) Cherubini informed them that the present regulations forbade him to admit foreigners. This, in Liszt’s words , came like a thunderclap. Cherubini himself was a foreigner.

Cherubini’s abrupt refusal to admit the boy to the Conservatoire ultimately worked to his advantage . His genius was allowed to develop unfettered.

There is no evidence that all this adulation spoiled the boy. Quite the contrary; he retained a childlike innocence which endeared him to all with whom he came into contact. Several thumb-nail sketches illuminate his character and appearance for us. He is described as possessing well-formed, regular features, and having a gentle manner.

A major artistic event for Liszt at this time was the publication of a set of twelve studies, the so-called Etude en douze exercices. These pieces are historically important, for they were later transformed into the Grandes Etudes of 1838 and later still into the Transcendental Studies of 1851. Liszt had begun work on these difficult pieces when he was only thirteen years old.

The Study in A-flat major (later known as Ricordanza) reveals that the nocturne-like melody, which so many commentators familiar with the 1851 version assume to have been inspired by Chopin, was in fact the creation of the thirteen-year-old Liszt. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oCtGsnlnPuU)

The Death of Liszt’s Father

“On his deathbed, at Boulogne-sur-Mer, [my father] told me that I was good-hearted and did not lack intelligence, but that he feared that women would trouble my existence and dominate me. This premonition was strange, for at sixteen years of age I had no idea of what a woman could be—and I naively asked my confessor to explain to me the Sixth and Ninth Commandments, fearing that I might perhaps have unwittingly transgressed them.”

Obscurity in Paris

"When death had robbed me of my father ... and I began to foresee what art might be and what the artist must be, I felt overwhelmed by all the impossibilities which surrounded me and barred the way which my thoughts indicated as the best. Besides, finding no sympathetic word from anyone harmonizing with me in mind, either among the contented leaders of society, or, still less, among the artists who were slumbering in comfortable indifference, knowing nothing of the aims I had in view, nothing of the powers with which I felt endowed, there came over me a bitter disgust against art, such as it appeared to me: vilified and degraded to the level of a more or less profitable handicap, branded as a source of amusement for distinguished society. I had sooner be anything in the world than a musician in the pay of the exalted, patronized and salaried by them like a conjuror, or the learned dog Munito. Peace to his memory!"

It was at this time that Liszt experienced his first love affair. Among his aristocratic pupils was Caroline de Saint-Cricq, ... (after Caroline finally agreed to her father's plan for an arranged marriage) Liszt suffered a nervous breakdown and succumbed once again to religious mania. He spent long hours prostrating himself on the cold flagstones of St.-Vincent-de-Paul, and again experienced longings to become a priest.

His bookshelves embraced both the sacred and the secular. He filled his head not only with the “Defence of Catholicism” by Lamennais, but also with the sceptical writings of Montaigne; not only with the religious poetry of Lamartine, but also with the agnostic prose of Voltaire. He often sat up half the night with such literature, looking for some key with which to unlock the world.

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Book Two: The Growing Virtuoso, 1830–1834

After the July Revolution

Hearing the sound of gunfire, he rushed out of doors and witnessed hand-to-hand fighting in the cobbled streets of Montmartre.... These experiences acted like a therapy and shook him from his lethargy. Anna Liszt, reflecting on these traumatic times , said , “ The guns cured him . ”

It was Countess Plater who , when asked to compare the merits of the three pianists who had played in her salon — Ferdinand Hiller, Chopin, and Liszt — said that she would choose Hiller as a friend , Chopin as a husband , and Liszt as a lover.

Nothing seemed more disparate to the countess than the contrast between Franz and Anna Liszt.

In order the better to play a study by Moscheles , the young master first made his pupil read Jenny by Victor Hugo . 19 These were unusual pedagogical conceptions . No wonder his students found him so stimulating . Madame Boissier aptly described these lessons with Liszt as “ a course in musical declamation . ”

This visit to the Salpêtrière hospital for the insane fits in with everything we know of the young Liszt’s sombre character. According to Madame Boissier, Liszt frequented “hospitals, gambling casinos and asylums.” He even went down into prison dungeons in order to see those condemned to die.

The fact is not sufficiently stressed that Liszt discovered himself as a composer at La Chênaie during that summer of 1834 . Several compositions were born there which bear the unmistakeable imprint of his mature style , including the three Apparitions , Harmonies poétiques et religieuses , and the revolutionary piece Lyon .

A Riot of Pianists

Paris in the 1830s was the centre of the pianistic world. Dozens of steel-fingered, chromium-plated virtuosos played there, including Kalkbrenner, Herz, Hiller, Hünten, Pixis, Thalberg, Dreyschock, and Cramer.

The relationship between Liszt and Heine was never easy. Heine’s qualified admiration for Liszt the pianist was tempered by his dislike for Liszt the man. He suspected Liszt’s instant enthusiasms and came to regard them as the expressions of a dilettante. “In what intellectual stall will he find his next hobbyhorse?” he sneered. At the root of the antagonism lay Liszt’s strong Catholic faith and his attraction to Lamennais, whose ideas the atheist Heine could not abide. Later it was whispered that Liszt had refused to pay the financially embarrassed Heine a bribe for a favourable review, and thus the two men parted company. (For all his brilliance and insight, Heine’s place in the history of music criticism is tarnished. He could be bought.)

Much of the piano’s new-found glory was caught from opera, for the modern instruments of Pleyel and Erard yearned to sing. ... Thalberg , Chopin , and Liszt were all avid opera-goers .

Liszt’s peculiar strength , both then and later , was that the individual branches of technique so assiduously cultivated and displayed on a selective basis by his contemporaries — octaves , scales , repeated notes , leaps — were all rolled into one in him . There was nothing they could do as a group that he could not do by himself .

Paganini

Paganini’s one solace throughout his long years of tribulation was his illegitimate son, Achille. Born in 1825 to Paganini’s mistress Antonia Bianchi, the boy became the centre of his existence, the only stable relationship in his life. While Achille was still a child he broke his leg, and the pain was such that no one could keep the small boy still. Paganini held his son for eight days and nights until the broken bones had begun to knit together, and then collapsed from exhaustion. Later there was a touching reversal of roles. As Paganini’s sicknesses gained dominion over his body, affecting both sight and speech, Achille became his eyes and voice, accompanying his father on his world tours. To compound his problems, a Prague surgeon had operated on Paganini’s infected lower jawbone, making it difficult for him to swallow food and adding yet another indignity to what de Courcy aptly called the long Calvary of his later years.7 Towards the end, Achille was Paganini’s sole intermediary with the outside world, protecting him from unwelcome visitors, fetching and carrying, administering medicines. At his death Paganini left the bulk of his estate (about 2 million lire) to Achille, together with the title “Baron,” which he had acquired on his journeys across Germany.

Four to five hours of exercises daily. It is a myth that Liszt never practised. He now set himself a titanic programme of work. Always the ideal of Paganini was before him. Liszt’s immediate aim was to create a new kind of repertoire for the piano in which he could transfer to the keyboard some of the more spectacular of Paganini’s feats—tremolos, leaps, glissandos, spiccato effects, bell-like harmonics. To this end he selected a group of Paganini’s unaccompanied Caprices, notorious for their difficulties, and set about reproducing their complex problems on the keyboard. He brought forth the first fruits of these endeavours in 1838, the Paganini Studies, which represented a breakthrough in piano technique.

Paganini’s artistry , for all its magic , had been flawed by his egotism.

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Book Two: The Growing Virtuoso, 1830–1834

Friends and Contemporaries: Berlioz and Chopin

During the years that followed, Berlioz suffered grinding poverty (Henrietta brought little to the marriage except her debts), and he was forced to undertake hack journalism in order to survive. In January 1834 Paganini commissioned him to write a new work so that he might show off his recently acquired Stradivarius viola. The result—Harold in Italy—did not please the virtuoso (“I am not given enough to do”), and the first performance was given with Urhan as the soloist. It was not until the winter of 1838 that Paganini first heard the work that he had inspired. Deeply moved, be declared Berlioz to be the successor to Beethoven. Berlioz has related in his Mémoires how Paganini approached him in the company of his twelve-year-old son, Achille. The violinist was already suffering from the tuberculosis of the larynx which was to kill him two years later, and he could barely whisper. He signalled to Achille, who climbed onto a chair and placed his ear close to his father’s mouth. After listening intently the boy climbed down again and addressed Berlioz: “My father bids me tell you, sir, that never in all his life has he been so affected by any concert. Your music has overwhelmed him.…” A few days later Paganini sent a gift of 20,000 francs to the impoverished Berlioz by the hand of Achille in recognition of the composer’s genius. The rumour was later put about by Paganini’s detractors that this gift was really from Armand Bertrand, the wealthy proprietor of the Journal des Débats, who wished to do good by stealth and used Paganini as his cover, but the tale is now discredited.(Berlioz’s Mémoires do not lack imaginative touches, but neither do they create deliberate falsehoods.) After Achille had left his bedside (Berlioz had collapsed with influenza immediately after the concert) the astonished composer summoned his wife, and together they knelt down and gave thanks. It is extraordinary to think that Berlioz heard the great violinist who played such an important role in his life on only one occasion, at a chamber-music concert.

Like everyone else, Berlioz had quickly succumbed to Liszt’s piano playing, and particularly to his playing of Beethoven. They were once invited to the home of the critic Ernest Legouvé, together with Eugène Sue and the playwright Prosper Goubaux, and in the course of the evening a typically Romantic scene ensued. The group had moved into Legouvé’s drawing room, which possessed a piano, only to discover that there were no lights and that the fire had burned low. Goubaux brought in a lamp while Liszt seated himself at the piano. “Turn up the wick,” said Legouvé, “we can’t see,” whereupon he accidentally turned it down, plunging the room into almost total darkness. Doubtless prompted by the gloom, Liszt began playing the Adagio of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata while everyone remained rooted to the spot. Occasionally the fire’s dying embers spluttered and cast strange shadows on the wall as the music unfolded its mournful melody. The experience was too much for Berlioz, who could not master his emotions. As Goubaux lit a candle, Liszt pointed to his friend, who had tears streaming down his cheeks, and murmured, “See, he has been listening to this as the ‘heir apparent’ of Beethoven.” As it happened, Beethoven’s mantle fell on neither of them, but the fact that the remark was uttered at all indicates the central position that the Viennese master, who had died barely four years earlier, already occupied in their young universe. It must be remembered that Beethoven was still viewed with suspicion by the ordinary music lover. Paris audiences in particular were convinced that his late works were the product of a deranged mind. (When the C-sharp minor Quartet was performed there in the late 1820s, most of the audience walked out.) It was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that a more favourable climate prevailed. Seen in this context, Berlioz’s short study of Beethoven, published in 1829, and Liszt’s public performance of the Hammerklavier Sonata in 1836 were acts of courage matched by few other musicians of the day.

One by one his early acquaintances either abandoned him or turned against him—Berlioz, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Hiller, Heine, Schlesinger—and this pattern was later repeated with Schumann, Joachim, von Bülow, and Wagner. In view of the many personal kindnesses extended by Liszt to all these colleagues over the years, their rejection of him is bewildering, and it tinged his life with sadness. When we read today that Liszt was “one of the leaders of the Romantic movement,” the phrase, however true, has a somewhat hollow ring to anyone familiar with the minutiae of his life; the fact is that for much of the time there was no one willing to be led by him at all, and for the last twelve years of his life he resigned himself to artistic isolation.

Enter Marie d’Agoult

(Marie's letter) Between us there was something at once very young and very serious , at once very profound and very naive .

She was aptly portrayed in her womanhood as “six inches of snow covering twenty feet of lava,” a description she quotes in her Souvenirs without disapproval.

Posterity has not treated Count d’Agoult kindly. He is usually depicted in biographies of Liszt as an insensitive husband and an indifferent father, giving Marie ample reason to leave him. It is time to set this canard aside: Charles d’Agoult held his wife and small daughters in great affection. He had feared for the stability of his marriage from the start, rightly pointing out that in her youth Marie had been surrounded by bad models.

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Book Three: The Years of Pilgrimage, 1835–1839

Elopement to Geneva

Arrived in Chamonix, Sand and the major tracked down Liszt and Marie at the Hôtel de l’Union. As Sand looked through the hotel register she saw that Liszt had signed himself in with a series of extravagant flourishes.

Place of birth:      Parnassus
Profession:          Musician-Philosopher
Coming from:         Doubt
Journeying towards:  Truth

Sand, rising to the occasion, picked up her pen, and wrote:

Names of travellers:   Piffoël family
Domicile:              Nature
Coming from:           God
Journeying towards:    Heaven
Place of birth:        Europe
Occupation:            Loafers
Date of passport:      Eternity
Issued by:             Public opinion

Sand arrived at the Hôtel de France at the end of October and occupied rooms on the floor immediately below Liszt and Marie. They shared a common sitting room where they entertained mutual friends. “Those of mine you don’t like,” wrote Sand, “will be received on the landing.” It was in the Hôtel de France that George Sand was introduced to Chopin and heard him play for the first time. Chopin appears at first to have been affronted by her cigars, her mannish dress, and her flamboyant manners. “What an antipathetic woman that Sand is!” he exclaimed to Hiller as they walked home after the party. “Is it really a woman? I am ready to doubt it.” And to his family in Warsaw he wrote that there was “something about her that repels me.” From such unlikely seeds blossomed a grande passion which perplexed even their closest friends, so mismatched a pair did they seem to be. Shortly afterwards (probably in early November) Liszt and Marie took Sand to see Chopin in his apartments in the rue de la Chaussée d’Antin. After some behind-the-scenes prodding, Chopin invited Sand back to his apartments on December 13, when he gave a large soirée. The company included the pianist Pixis, the tenor Adolphe Nourrit, and a number of Polish exiles, led by Albert Grzymala, who had been wounded by the Russians in the winter campaign of 1812. Sand was determined to make a better impression this time and turned up wearing white pantaloons and a scarlet sash—the colours of the Polish flag. Marie d’Agoult served tea and helped pass round ices; Nourrit sang some Schubert songs, with Liszt accompanying. The highlight of the evening was a performance by Chopin and Liszt of Moscheles’s Sonata in E-flat major for four hands, with Chopin playing the secondo part and Liszt the primo. The Sand-Chopin affair, so important in the annals of Romantic music, was aided and abetted in its beginnings by Marie d’Agoult, who was doubtless glad to shift the spotlight from herself and give Paris a different scandal to gossip about.

At the concert on February 4 an innocent hoax was perpetrated on the unsuspecting Paris public. In order to make a better effect the programme was turned around, the Beethoven trio changing places with a trio by Pixis. No announcement was made. The audience applauded vigorously after the Pixis trio, thinking it to be by Beethoven; the Beethoven trio drew a lukewarm response, everybody assuming it to be by Pixis. Not a word of all this can be found in the contemporary press. The critics of the day, apparently, could not hear the difference. (A notable exception was Berlioz, who spotted the switch at once.) The episode merely served to strengthen Liszt’s resolve to insist on “peer criticism,” the right of every artist to be criticized by his equals, and it does not surprise us to find him developing this central theme in his writings.

The Lion Shakes His Mane: Liszt’s Duel with Thalberg

And here we have a clue to Thalberg’s success: the man and the instrument came together at just the right moment in history. The ideals of the one found a perfect vehicle of expression in the other.

As early as October 1835 the Paris journals were spoiling for a fight. On October 25 the Gazette Musicale, taking note of the unusually large contingent of pianists in Paris, talked of that “special corps of distinguished artists who are going to wrestle zealously and with talent for our winter pleasures.” These “winter pleasures” had turned into a veritable carnival, with pianists lining up to play in the Erard and Pleyel showrooms; more than two hundred concerts were held in those establishments during the 1835–36 season alone. Thalberg had soon “wrestled” his way to the top, become the man of the hour, and departed.

When asked to sum up the verdict, Princess Belgiojoso came out with a diplomatic aphorism that has found a permanent niche in the literature: “Thalberg is the first pianist in the world—Liszt is unique.”

Liszt, unlike his biographers, did not lose interest in Thalberg the moment he left Princess Belgiojoso’s salon in March 1837. With true generosity of heart Liszt featured some of Thalberg’s music in his later concerts, and he renewed his acquaintance with the Kammervirtuos when he visited Vienna in 1838. Twenty-eight years later we find him writing to Thalberg and addressing him as “illustrious friend.” And two or three days after Thalberg’s death at Posilipo in 1871, Liszt wrote to his widow a touching letter of consolation.

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Book Three: The Years of Pilgrimage, 1835–1839

Switzerland and Italy

At home Cosima was known by the unique diminutive “Cosette,” an affectionate nickname by which her father addressed her all his life. When Victor Hugo called the heroine of Les Misérables (1862) Cosette, he could only have borrowed the name of Liszt’s daughter.

Liszt had few illusions about what he was up against when, on December 10, 1837, with the influential backing of Ricordi and Rossini, he took over the Scala opera house, placed his solitary Erard piano in the centre of that vast stage, and gave a solo recital. But even he must have received a jolt when, in the middle of a performance of one of his studies (duly announced beforehand), a gentleman called out from the stalls, “Vengo al teatro per divertirmi e non per studiare!” ("I come to the theatre to enjoy myself, not to study!") This comical incident set the tone for Liszt’s two other Milan concerts, given in the Assembly Rooms on February 18 and March 20, 1838. On one occasion he placed a silver urn, recently presented to him by a group of admirers, in the foyer of the concert hall to receive suggestions for themes on which he might improvise. The urn was then ceremoniously borne onto the stage so that Liszt might read the suggestions aloud from the platform. He had reckoned without the wry humour of the Milanese, however. The first slip of paper read “The Milan Cathedral,” the next “The Railway Station.” The pride of the collection carried this conundrum: “Is it better to marry or remain a bachelor?” Liszt rose to the occasion and recalled to his audience the words of the sage: “Whatever conclusion one comes to, whether to marry or remain single, one will always repent it.”The Milanese appreciated his ready wit more than his piano playing.

The relationship between Liszt and the countess was, in fact, approaching its dénouement. They had reached that most mournful of all the conditions that can afflict two lovers: they were unhappy together and unhappy apart.

After the Flood in Hungary, 1838–1839

She hurled at him her final epithet. “I called him a Don Juan parvenu,”a phrase that has become a locus classicus in the Liszt literature. Liszt never forgot this insult.

After contemplating the great masters of the Italian Renaissance he wrote to Berlioz that the various arts were really unified, that “Raphael and Michelangelo make Mozart and Beethoven more easy for me to understand.” Herein lay the germ of Liszt’s theory of programme music, developed during his Weimar years. Although he had no inkling of it at the time, the Eternal City was to dominate his old age and for the last twenty-five years of his life draw him constantly back. In Rome Liszt became acquainted with Ingres, the director of the French Academy at the Villa Medici, whose knowledge of the city’s art treasures was unrivalled. Liszt’s friendship with Ingres almost amounted to a bargain, for Ingres was a music-lover, and in return for being shown round the galleries and churches, Liszt would play to him and even listen to Ingres play his violin. A lasting testimonial to their encounter was the famous drawing of Liszt that Ingres made at this time. (https://www.wikiart.org/en/jean-auguste-dominique-ingres/franz-liszt) Liszt’s first visit to Rome was further enlivened by the unexpected appearance of Sainte-Beuve, en route from Milan to Genoa and Pisa. The distinguished literary critic spent a few days in Liszt’s company, and together they visited the gardens of Tivoli and explored Hadrian’s magnificent Villa. Sainte-Beuve enshrined his impressions in a poem, “La Villa Adriana,” which he dedicated to Liszt. (In 1831 Sainte-Beuve had published a set of poems, Les Consolations. This was to be the origin of the title Liszt later gave to six of his best-known piano miniatures.)

The crowning achievement of the “Italian” volume of the Années de pèlerinage is the so-called Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi sonata.

In an amusing letter to Marie, Liszt observed that he had become so famous that even the doctor treating him for a cold—he had arrived in Vienna with a fever—had suddenly been inundated with new patients requesting not treatment but news of the great pianist.

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Book Four: The Years of Transcendental Execution, 1839–1847

Liszt and the Keyboard

The years 1839 – 47 are still described by Liszt scholars as his “ years of transcendental execution , ” when he embarked on a virtuoso career unmatched in the history of performance.

Liszt’s career remains the model which is still followed by pianists today . The modern piano recital was invented by Liszt . He was the first to play entire programmes from memory . He was the first to play the whole keyboard repertory ( as it then existed ) , from Bach to Chopin . He was the first consistently to place the piano at right angles to the platform , its open lid reflecting the sound across the auditorium . He was the first to tour Europe from the Pyrenees to the Urals, and that at a time when the only way to traverse such distances was by post-chaise, a slow and often uncomfortable mode of travel. The very term “recital” was his; he introduced it in London on June 9, 1840, for a concert in the Hanover Square Rooms. In Milan and St. Petersburg he played before audiences of three thousand people or more, the first time a solo pianist had appeared before such vast assemblies. (Tomášek, in his autobiography, claimed that Dussek had already positioned his piano in this way, the better to show off his beautiful profile. Dussek did not do this consistently, however, and in any case his career had no lasting impact on the history of piano playing. Liszt appears to have been unaware of Dussek’s tentative reforms when he came to the conclusion that one must not only play the piano but “play the building,” and to that end he experimented with the placement of the instrument until he got it right.)

Clara Schumann once described Liszt as “a smasher of pianos.” It is a false image. Even Clara snapped a string or two in public. Most pianists in the first half of the nineteenth century regarded it as a normal hazard of their profession. Liszt’s practical solution was occasionally to have two pianos standing on the platform simultaneously, and he would make a point of moving from one keyboard to the other several times in the course of a recital. ... (During Liszt’s stay in London in the summer of 1840, the periodical John Bull (May 3) carried an advertisement informing its readers that “each piece” to be heard in Liszt’s first concert on May 8 “will be played on a separate Grand Piano, selected by himself from Erard’s.” Since he played at least four solo items on that occasion, the stage must have been jammed with keyboards.)

No artist before Liszt, not even Paganini, succeeded so completely in breaking down the barriers that traditionally separated performing artists from those who were then grandly called their “social superiors.” After Liszt, all performers began to enjoy a higher status in society. Haydn and Mozart had been treated like servants; whenever they visited the homes of nobility they had entered by the back door. Beethoven, by dint of his unique genius and his uncompromising nature, had forced the Viennese aristocracy at least to regard him as their equal. But it was left to Liszt to foster the view that an artist is a superior being, because divinely gifted, and that the rest of mankind, of whatever social class, owed him respect and even homage.

After 1842 “ Lisztomania ” swept Europe , and the reception accorded the pianist can only be described as hysterical . Admirers swarmed all over him , and ladies fought over his silk handkerchiefs and velvet gloves , which they then ripped to pieces as souvenirs . Sober-minded musicians like Chopin , Schumann , and Mendelssohn were appalled by such vulgar displays of hero - worship and gradually came to despise Liszt because of them .

Whatever else the world may debate about his life and work , one thing is generally conceded : Liszt was the first modern pianist . The technical “ breakthrough ” he achieved during the 1830s and ’ 40s was without precedent in the history of the piano .

Why not branch out into the larger orchestral forms, like Berlioz, instead of wasting time at a keyboard? Liszt reflected carefully on his position and produced his “Letter to Adolphe Pictet,” an autobiographical document of some importance. His abiding love for the piano, and his unshakable belief in its future, shine forth.

According to his own testimony, Liszt sometimes practised for ten or twelve hours a day, and much of this labour was expended on endurance exercises—scales, arpeggios, trills, and repeated notes. He set great store by the absolute independence of each finger. Every scale was practised with the fingering of every other scale (using, say, C-major fingering for F-sharp major, and D-flat major fingering for C major).

Liszt’s contemporaries were constantly amazed at his finger dexterity. He could apparently respond to any emergency. Joachim never forgot the manner in which Liszt accompanied him in the finale of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, all the time holding a lighted cigar between the first and middle fingers of the right hand. Lina Ramann relates a similar story. She once told Liszt that Ludwig Böhner had played fugues on the organ, in spite of two lame fingers. Liszt pondered this problem for a while, then, “with a certain tension of the muscles of the face, he seated himself at the piano and began to play a difficult fugue by Bach, with three fingers of each hand.” Liszt’s playing of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto in Vienna on the fiftieth anniversary of the composer’s death was the occasion for an equally impressive feat. Sometime before the performance he cut the second finger of his left hand.24 He played the concerto without using that particular finger, redistributing the notes among the remaining ones in such a way that no one was aware of the injury he had sustained.

Brahms, no Liszt admirer, used to maintain that in Liszt’s old operatic fantasies was to be found “the true classicism of the piano.”

“Classical” playing was a discovery of the Romantics. Beethoven, that is to say, did not play his music classically. What in the profession is nowadays called fidelity to the text was hardly fostered until the second half of the nineteenth century, when it became associated with the “restrained” performances of such artists as Clara Schumann and Joachim. Today, of course, it has become dogma. Liszt was deeply concerned by this trend, which he regarded as a denial of the player’s artistic personality. He aptly called it the “Pilate offence”—washing one’s hands of musical interpretation in public—and he would have nothing to do with it.

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Book Four: The Years of Transcendental Execution, 1839–1847

A Prodigal Returns to Hungary, 1839–1840

Liszt’s special interest in the Gypsies now had an important creative consequence. In 1840 he produced a series of pieces called Magyar Dallok (“Hungarian National Melodies”) based on material he heard the Gypsies play. They were later revised and published under the generic title Hungarian Rhapsodies (1851–53). ... Chief among them is the sound of the cimbalom, which can be heard shimmering at the opening of the Eleventh Rhapsody.

The term “rhapsody” was absolutely right for such pieces. Liszt recalled that the ancient Greek orator was called a rhapsode, and in his “rhapsody of words” he enshrined the history and the epic deeds of his people. By setting himself up as a national bard, however, Liszt, as we shall shortly discover, demonstrated that he misunderstood the nature of Gypsy music, and he subsequently created grave problems for himself among the Magyars.

The Gypsy proved conclusively that music was innate, like eating and breathing, and that it was not “put there” by civilizing influences. Liszt’s attraction to this idea was so firm that it had an amusing outcome. One day, while still in Hungary, he was speculating aloud on the challenge of attempting to give a formal education to a Gypsy musician. His words, uttered casually, were taken seriously. Liszt has told us how Count Sándor Teleki later turned up in Paris saying, “Look, I’ve brought you a present!” There stood “Josi” Sárai, a twelve-year-old Gypsy violinist dressed in Hungarian costume. Teleki had discovered Josi on his estates in Hungary and, recalling Liszt’s words, had bought him from his Gypsy parents in order to give him to Liszt. The education of Josi (an attempt to civilize a savage) failed. True to his childish nature, he stole any object he fancied, broke any mechanism he did not understand. Liszt gave him money. He spent it all on a colourful wardrobe of waistcoats and cravats, and on the latest coiffure, in order to attract the eyes of the passing ladies. When Liszt left Paris on his Spanish tour in 1844 he placed Josi in the hands of the violinist Lambert Massart, who found him uncontrollable and unteachable.Josi was finally sent back to Hungary and reunited with his tribe. In the first edition of Des Bohémiens Liszt wondered what had become of him. To his delight, Josi replied with a letter. He was now playing in a Gypsy band in Debreczin, he told Liszt, and was happily married to a Gypsy woman. He had a son called Ferenc, named after Liszt, who had been made the child’s godfather in absentia. Liszt was pleased by this remembrance and sent the little boy a miniature violin on which to continue the family tradition. ... The case of Josi Sárai taught Liszt an important lesson. One of his chief concerns in Des Bohémiens was the harmful consequences of civilization on Gypsy culture. He lamented the fact that even in his day the process of corruption had already begun.

To the world at large it appeared that the Gypsies were the true representatives of Hungarian music , and the Hungarians violently objected.

The World Tours I: Prague, Leipzig, and London, 1840–1841

(Schumann said) It is unlikely that any other artist, excepting only Paganini, has the power to lift, carry, and deposit an audience in such high degree. A Viennese writer has celebrated Liszt in a poem consisting of nothing but adjectives beginning with the individual letters of his name. It is a tasteless thing as poetry, but there is something to be said for it. Just as we are overwhelmed in leafing through a dictionary by an onslaught of definitions, so in listening to Liszt are we overwhelmed by an onslaught of sounds and sensations. In a matter of seconds we have been exposed to tenderness, daring, fragrance, and madness. The instrument glows and sparkles under the hands of its master. This has all been described a hundred times, and the Viennese, in particular, have tried to trap the eagle in every possible way—with winged pursuit, with snares, with pitchforks, and with poems. It simply has to be heard—and seen. If Liszt were to play behind the scenes, a considerable portion of poetry would be lost.

In 1869 Liszt gave an interesting oral account of Schumann’s reaction to his performance of the Fantasy: “I remember the first time I played it to the great composer; he remained perfectly silent in his chair at the close of the first movement, which rather disappointed me. So I asked him what impression my rendering of the work had made upon him, and what improvements he could suggest, being naturally anxious to hear the composer’s ideas as to the reading of so noble a composition. He asked me to proceed with the ‘March,’ after which he would give me his criticism. I played the second movement, and with such effect that Schumann jumped out of the chair, flung his arms round me, and with tears in his eyes, cried ‘Göttlich! our ideas are absolutely identical as regards the rendering of these movements, only you with your magic fingers have carried my ideas to a realization that I never dreamt of!’ ” Liszt told Schumann, “ I feel as if I had known you twenty years . ”

the resulting conflict between Leipzig and Weimar took on all the trappings of a classical drama : the old versus the new , the past versus the future , reaction versus revolution. ... In 1840, when Liszt first stepped onto that august stage, he had no notion of this. He was, in fact, preoccupied with more immediate problems. Schumann was at that time in the midst of a lawsuit against Friedrich Wieck, the object of which was to force Wieck to show cause why the twenty-year-old Clara should not be allowed to marry Schumann. Liszt took Schumann’s side. He snubbed Wieck by refusing to send him press tickets for his Dresden concerts. This garrulous old man, who lived in Dresden and was a respected musical figure there, was outraged and started to slander Liszt and his pupil Hermann Cohen in the Leipzig papers. Liszt shrugged off his attacks. Cohen, however, took Wieck to court and eventually won substantial damages against him. Clara now sprang to her father’s defence, turned against Liszt, and wrote to Robert: “This has cost me bitter tears and it is not right of you at all.” To add to Liszt’s troubles, the Leipzigers were also annoyed because the “free list” of complimentary tickets traditionally distributed on such occasions was suspended. Then Liszt developed a severe fever, which put him to bed for two days. He was already unwell at the time of his opening concert on March 17, facing an unfriendly audience. He began with his transcription of the Scherzo and Finale of Beethoven’s Pastorale Symphony, and failed to do himself justice. “It was a wilful choice,” wrote Schumann, "... In a large hall, and one, moreover, where we have heard the symphony played by the orchestra so often and so perfectly, the weakness of the instrument was painfully evident, especially where it was called upon to reproduce the big effects." ... Liszt cancelled his second concert, scheduled for the next day. The story was inexplicably put about by Schumann that Liszt had retired to his hotel with a “diplomatic cold,” offended by the cool reception he had received. ... Mendelssohn generously arranged a private concert in Liszt’s honour (for which he rented the Gewandhaus, engaged the services of two hundred and fifty singers and players, served mulled wine and cakes, and invited special guests). The idea was to compensate for the negative impression left by Liszt’s opening concert and heal the breach with the public.

The World Tours II: Berlin and St. Petersburg, 1841–1842

It was at Berlin that “ Lisztomania ” swept in . The word was coined by Heine . The symptoms , which are odious to the modern reader , bear every resemblance to an infectious disease , and merely to call them mass hysteria hardly does justice to what actually took place. His portrait was worn on brooches and cameos. Swooning lady admirers attempted to take cuttings of his hair, and they surged forward whenever he broke a piano string in order to make it into a bracelet. Some of these insane female “fans” even carried glass phials about their persons into which they poured his coffee dregs. Others collected his cigar butts, which they hid in their cleavages.

The very next day, April 26, Liszt attended a recital given by Chopin in the Salle Pleyel. For months Chopin’s admirers had been urging him to make one of his rare, reluctant appearances, and he had finally agreed. George Sand is amusing on this topic. She referred to the forthcoming recital as “this Chopinesque nightmare,” and went on, “He will have nothing to do with posters or programmes and does not want a large audience. He wants to have the affair kept quiet. So many things alarm him that I suggest that he should play without candles or audience, and on a dumb keyboard.…”

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Book Four: The Years of Transcendental Execution, 1839–1847

Marie d’Agoult Becomes “Daniel Stern”: Nélida versus Guermann

(About Marie's salon) A frequent visitor was Emile de Girardin, the editor of La Presse; his wife was Delphine Gay, the poetess, who had known Marie long before her liaison with Liszt had begun and now smoothed the path for her return into fashionable society. Girardin was a notoriously taciturn man who never took part in after-dinner conversations but would silently withdraw, leave his loquacious wife in charge of the field, wrap himself in an enormous shawl, and doze quietly in a corner of the room until it was time to go back to his office. His newspaper was his life, and he was one of the best editors in France. He had a flair for discerning the major issues of the day and for spotting new writing talents to treat them. Girardin became deeply interested in Marie d’Agoult and in the story of her years of “exile” with Liszt in Italy.

In Marie’s quest for her “ great man ” it was clearly implied that she , and she alone , would be his guiding light , his inspiration . Liszt soon made it plain that she was to be nothing of the sort .

There are few sadder spectacles in Liszt’s life than the one of him quarrelling so bitterly with his old lover over their children , the finest fruits of their love .

By December 17 he had moved on to Seville, where he was overwhelmed by the grandeur of the cathedral. ... Liszt heard the cathedral organist Eugenio Gómez. Gómez showed Liszt a group of pieces from his Melodias armonizados and asked for his frank opinion. Liszt, who was full of praise for these colourful gems, replied, “One defect, and a very grave defect, which I have discovered in your Armonizados … is that there are only twelve instead of twenty-four or forty-eight, as all true music-lovers will wish. Make haste, my dear M. Gómez, to repair this unpardonable defect as quickly as possible.”

and Liszt joked, “I need my glasses to look for my glasses.” Behind the witticism lay a serious observation: after twenty-five years of sight-reading and composing at all hours of the day and night, he was now quite myopic.

It is amusing to observe that within a few months of the appearance of Nélida, George Sand had produced her novel Lucrezia Floriani, in which Chopin is depicted as Prince Karol, a weak and unstable neurotic. Was this a coincidence? Hardly. The astonishing parallels between Marie d’Agoult and George Sand must be remarked. Within a year of Marie’s elopement with Liszt, in 1835, Sand has “acquired” Chopin. Both ladies stay with their paramours on romantic islands—Nonnenwerth and Valldemosa, respectively. Both live there in deserted monasteries. Both leave their sanctuaries disillusioned. Both quarrel with their pianist-lovers. Both then pick up their pens and write novels about them, taking care to position themselves in a favourable light. Both write memoirs in later life which tell history that they were wronged. And the paramours themselves? Both refuse adamantly to recognize themselves in these novels. It is as if there were two different pairs of actors but only one script.

The Beethoven Monument Unveiled in Bonn, 1845

In the middle of July, just four weeks before the festival began, it was discovered that Bonn had no suitable auditorium in which to hold the concerts. In consternation, the festival committee toured the city, unsuccessfully trying out one hall after another. When Liszt heard of this latest debacle he expressed the view that a Festhalle should be specially constructed. The committee balked at the idea on the grounds of expense. Liszt then offered to pay for the construction costs out of his own pocket. In the face of such magnanimity the committee was shamed into silence.Bonn in those days was only one hour’s distance from Cologne. In this city lived the architect Zwirner, whose firm was involved in the construction of Cologne Cathedral. Fired by Liszt’s enthusiasm, Zwirner and his team of devoted workmen set to work. A site was found, trees were felled, earth was levelled, and one of the great Rhine rafts was broken up for timber. Interior decorations were made in Cologne and transported to Bonn. Slowly the Festhalle rose like a mirage. Nearly 300 feet in length, it resembled a great oblong box and could seat three thousand people. The nave comprised two rows of fourteen arches each. To offset the crude effect of exposed timber beams, the roof was painted pale blue. Trimmed fir trees formed the central pillars; since there was no time to plane them, they were festooned with hanging ivy. The walls were hung with pale red paper which, from a distance, took on the hue of marble. It was a masterpiece of improvisation. More remarkable still, everyone agreed that the acoustics were excellent. The builders worked round the clock, and by August 9 the edifice was ready.

Then came the unkindest cut of all: Liszt was accused of putting on a one-man show, of organizing the Beethoven Festival around his own personality. This was the classical defence of little men who have shirked their responsibilities. Where were they when they were needed, during the long years of public indifference? No one had robbed them of the limelight then. The charge, in any case, was untrue. Liszt had asked Spohr to share the artistic direction of the festival and to do most of the conducting. Liszt himself took part in three works only: he conducted Beethoven’s C-minor Symphony, appeared as soloist in the Emperor Concerto, and directed his own Festival Cantata. For the rest of the time he was consumed with anxiety lest the organizing committee commit some new blunder and push the festival from the precipice on which it was so precariously balanced into the abyss below. He was also privately disappointed at the conduct of friends and colleagues of whom he had a right to expect more. Moscheles, for example, was asked to accompany a singer in a performance of Beethoven’s “Adelaïde,” but when he learned that Madame Pleyel was to play a concerto in the same programme, he refused “to perform an inferior service.”The attitude of Anton Schindler, who at that time had the unique distinction of being Beethoven’s only biographer, was still more perverse. Schindler had publicly protested in the columns of the Kölnische Zeitung at the choice of Liszt to conduct the C-minor Symphony, asserting that as a mere pianist, Liszt lacked the necessary experience. This provoked a polemical reply whose anonymous author pointed out that Liszt had already directed the A-major and C-minor symphonies in Weimar, and the Coriolan Overture in Berlin. The writer urged Schindler, in effect, to “put up or shut up.” Schindler evidently decided to shut up, and although he attended the festival it was in the capacity of a private citizen with no official status whatsoever. Hiller, Mendelssohn, and Schumann stayed away from the festival altogether. This powerful boycott raised a number of eyebrows. The criticisms Liszt subsequently endured from the “Leipzig School” after he had settled permanently in Weimar showed him that he was not wrong to regard the boycott as an early expression of hostility towards himself. Such conduct hurt him deeply, coming from colleagues whose interests he had so often placed above his own.

The World Tours III: Transylvania, Russia, and Turkey, 1846–1847

At the last of his three concerts, on January 11, 1847, he shared the platform with Alexander Flechtenmacher, one of the founders of Rumanian music. Flechtenmacher conducted his Moldavian Overture, which proved to be so popular that the large audience demanded its immediate encore. As a finale to the concert, Liszt improvised on the hora (a national dance) and cleverly combined it with themes from the Moldavian Overture, thus, in the words of the local press, “rendering formal homage for the elegant welcome he had been given, in public and private, from all the people of our capital.” This concert is still regarded as a watershed in the history of Rumanian music because of the encouragement it gave to aspiring native composers to cast aside their Austro-German straitjackets and realize their national aspirations.

... sitting in the audience that night was Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, ... Suffice it to say that one immediate consequence of this chance encounter in Kiev was that Liszt was finally prevailed upon to give up his career as a concert pianist , a career that was slowly destroying him , and for this we must be grateful .