Lisztomania

Franz Liszt (1811-86) was a controversial figure indeed. A pianist of unprecedented virtuosity, he inspired a frenzy that bordered on religious ecstasy with his carefully staged performances. Strikingly handsome, with sea-green eyes, shoulder-length hair, and a slim countenance, he entered the stage with cloak and gloves that were ceremoniously removed before the music began. He created an aura not unlike that of a rock star, with a similar result: Women fought over his discarded handkerchiefs and cigar butts. The residue from his washbowl was secretly siphoned off and preserved like holy water. The cover on one of his chairs was removed and framed as a precious souvenir. And Liszt’s bohemian lifestyle—two long-term liaisons with married women and three children fathered out of wedlock (there may have been more, according to Hilmes)—only added to the mystique.

Liszt’s assertive playing style was provocative, too, since it approached musical combat. He routinely broke strings on the fragile pianos of his day and sometimes damaged keys with his strong attack. In Vienna, he once arranged for three instruments to be placed on stage and worked his way through each, with the gusto of a conquering superhero. “My concert has just finished—enthusiasm impossible to describe,” he wrote to his mistress Marie d’Agoult after receiving 18 curtain calls and being carried out of the theater by an impassioned audience. Heinrich Heine termed the delirium that surrounded these events “Lisztomania.” Europe had never seen anything like it.

And with the triumphant concerts came adoring women—not just d’Agoult and Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, Liszt’s second long-term companion, but also Olga Janina, Agnes Street-Klindworth, Lina Schmal-hausen, Charlotte von Hagn, and a host of others—including an unidentified groupie who appeared naked on the balcony of Liszt’s hotel room after a recital, apparently to stake her claim. Even George Sand and Lola Montez, two of the most notorious female figures of the day, made cameo appearances in Liszt’s life.

Hilmes reports this larger-than-life tale in great detail. He relies upon meticulously documented research, and he uses disclaimers when the narrative moves into the realm of pure speculation (“We simply do not know from whose loins the infant sprang,” he states, after making the case that Liszt fathered at least one of Agnes Street-Klindworth’s children). In his eagerness to paint a vivid picture, he sometimes lapses into overheated prose, which seems to go naturally with his approach. In speaking of Olga Janina, for instance, he writes:

Or of Liszt’s final days:

Thank God for grief counseling!

Liszt was born in 1811 in Raiding, a small village in what was then the Kingdom of Hungary, some 25 miles south of Eisenstadt, where Haydn had served the Esterházy family in the previous century. Hungary was under Habsburg rule at the time, and Liszt grew up in a German-speaking household. (Although he was later hailed as a Hungarian cultural hero, he never learned the language well.) Liszt’s father, Adam, an amateur musician, sensed his son’s talent early on and, after teaching him the fundamentals of piano-playing and harmony, successfully appealed to local aristocrats for financial support to take the boy to Vienna. There Franz studied piano with Carl Czerny, the foremost pedagogue of the day, and composition with Antonio Salieri, Mozart’s alleged nemesis. He made progress so quickly that he was invited to contribute to the set of 50 variations solicited from Schubert, Czerny, Hummel, and other leading composers by the publisher Anton Diabelli. (Beethoven declined to join the group and compiled his own set of variations on Diabelli’s theme.) Liszt’s variation, written at age 11, already displays the snarly turbulence of his later works.

But even more impressive was the young Liszt’s playing, which Adam quickly recognized as an exploitable talent. Father and son soon embarked on a series of highly profitable concert tours to Munich, Paris, London, and other cities, where the teenager was hailed as a “new Mozart” and performed for increasingly high fees. Hilmes reports that a single recital in Manchester garnered £100, the equivalent today of $57,000. But Adam died during a tour in France in 1827, forcing the 15-year-old Franz to take matters into his own hands. He moved to Paris, where he learned the French language that he was to prefer the rest of his life, and prepared for a career as a concert pianist.

On April 20, 1832, Liszt attended a recital by the Italian violinist Niccolò Paganini. He was dumbstruck by the performance, and Hilmes, like biographers before him, views the encounter as a major turning point in Liszt’s development. Paganini played with a virtuosity that approached wizardry: It was not just his bravura technique that moved audiences, but also his highly dramatic stage persona. Liszt was deeply impressed and later paid homage to Paganini with a set of piano études based on his violin caprices. His greater debt, however, was the realization that a music recital could be an event: Inspired by Paganini, Liszt became the world’s first consummate piano showman.

Three years later, Liszt took up with the first important woman in his life, Marie d’Agoult, who was witty, well read, and unhappily married to a nobleman. She was six years older than Liszt and provided stability to his life. In the summer of 1835, they escaped to Switzerland, where their first daughter, Blandine, was born. Two other children, Cosima and Daniel, followed. In the early spring of 1838, Liszt traveled to Vienna to play a series of recitals for flood victims in Hungary. The response was overwhelming, spurred both by Liszt’s playing and the patriotic fervor he inspired.

The Vienna events ushered in what is commonly termed Liszt’s “Virtuoso Period” (1839-47), when he crisscrossed Europe from Lisbon to Moscow and Glasgow to Naples, presenting more than a thousand concerts in eight years. He played in the most important public venues and performed before Queen Victoria, the Ottoman sultan in Constantinople, and the czar of Russia. Hilmes shows that his concerts were not only booked but carefully orchestrated by his secretary, Gaetano Belloni. Liszt introduced audiences to a wide range of repertory, from unfamiliar piano compositions by Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Chopin to his own ingenious transcriptions of works by Bach, Schubert, Berlioz, and others. But he invariably ended the programs with stirring renditions of his own pieces: dramatic and pyrotechnical études, Hungarian rhapsodies, opera paraphrases.

Up to this time, pianists had shared the stage with vocalists, instruments, and other musicians in potpourri programs featuring a wide variety of solo and ensemble works. Liszt appeared alone, and in so doing, almost single-handedly invented the modern solo recital. “Le concert c’est moi,” Hilmes quotes him as saying.

But Liszt’s tours took a toll on his relationship with Marie d’Agoult. By 1844, the two had separated, and in 1846, Liszt took up with another married woman, Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, a fabulously wealthy Russian princess. Although short and homely, she possessed a sharp intelligence and, like d’Agoult before her, served to stabilize Liszt’s life. In January 1848, after completing a third triumphant European tour, Liszt suddenly pulled a complete about-face and moved with Sayn-Wittgenstein to the sleepy town of Weimar (population 12,000), where he began a new career as kapellmeister and master teacher.

As director of the Weimar court orchestra, Liszt presented programs of cutting-edge music, including more than 40 operas and complete festivals of works by Berlioz and Wagner. An exacting conductor, he dedicated 46 rehearsals to the preparation of Lohengrin, which he premiered in Weimar in 1850. From this isolated outpost he became the leading spokesman for music of the New German School. As a teacher, Liszt offered free lessons and accommodations to those who qualified, giving daily master classes to the leading young pianists of Europe. Over the 14 years of his stay, his residence became a pilgrimage spot for musicians, writers, and artists.

Then, in another transmogrification, Liszt moved to Rome in 1861 to take up minor orders in the Roman Catholic church, possibly with the goal of becoming music director to the Papal Chapel. Now known as “Abbé Liszt,” he wore a long black cassock and composed religious compositions in his modest quarters at the monastery of Madonna del Rosario. There he even gave up his grand piano, making do with a small, out-of-tune upright instrument. Still, he continued to be viewed as a celebrity and was visited frequently by musicians and dignitaries, including Pope Pius IX, who, after listening to Liszt play his latest sacred work, St. François d’Assise: La prédication aux oiseaux, joined him at the piano to sing “Casta diva” from Bellini’s Norma.

Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein had moved to Rome in 1860 in the hope of obtaining a divorce through papal intervention. She received an audience but was ultimately unsuccessful in her quest; and although her husband died four years later, opening the door for marriage to Liszt, the two never wed. From 1869 onward, Liszt divided his time among Weimar, Rome, and Budapest, teaching, composing, and giving benefit concerts. In Budapest, he joined the faculty of the newly established Academy of Music and helped to launch the Hungarian school of music pedagogy.

Even in his twilight years, however, intrigue followed him in the form of his daughter Cosima’s affair with Richard Wagner. While married to Liszt’s brilliant student Hans von Bülow, Cosima fell in love with Wagner and proceeded to have three children with him, even as her husband was conducting the Munich premieres of Tristan und Isolde, Tannhäuser, and Die Meistersinger. After a six-year affair, she finally obtained a divorce from Bülow, marrying Wagner in 1870.

In 1886, at 75, Liszt embarked on a final series of recitals in Vienna, Liège, Antwerp, and London. To Hilmes, the trip resembled a celebrity farewell tour, with large audiences appearing to hear their idol for the last time. And although Liszt was exhausted from his travels, he nevertheless journeyed to Bayreuth to lend support to Cosima, who had taken over the performances of Wagner’s operas after his death three years earlier. There Liszt died.

Oliver Hilmes’s rendering of these events is accurate and thoroughly footnoted. Abundantly embellished with quotations from contemporary letters, diaries, and newspaper articles, his book gives a good sense not only of the emotion-charged events in Liszt’s career but also of the quotidian ups and downs of daily life in the 19th century. Liszt and his contemporaries come alive in the engagingly written text. Another plus is Stewart Spencer’s smooth, idiomatic translation of the German original.

The principal shortcoming, however, is that Franz Liszt dwells on the seamier side of Liszt’s activities to the neglect of his accomplishments as an artist. Once the narrative reaches the virtuoso years, it shifts focus from the pianist’s music and music-making to his amorous escapades. And toward the end, when the long list of women has finally played out, the discussion turns to his drinking habits. Portrayed in this light, the elderly Liszt comes across as an aged has-been, plagued by petty problems, rather than a heroic figure championing worthy causes. (His large donation for the erection of a Bach monument in Eisenach in 1883 impoverished him for almost a year.)

In a Postlude, Hilmes quotes the Austrian conductor Felix Weingartner’s description of Liszt on his funeral bier:

Much the same can be said of the Liszt in Hilmes’s study: After wading through page after page of social intrigue, one finds it difficult to recognize the musical giant who founded the modern school of bravura piano-playing, trained the next generation of piano virtuosos, and opened the door to the atonal experiments of the 20th century through his own late compositions (such as the Bagatelle sans tonalité of 1885). One gets little feeling for the exuberant panache of the opera transcriptions, the impressionistic shimmer of transcendental études, or the iconoclastic gestures of the symphonic poems.

In fact, the transformative Faust and Dante symphonies are relegated to two short paragraphs, swept aside by the tsunami of scuttlebutt that floods Hilmes’s account. Yet in Liszt’s time, the shock waves produced by his music had greater impact than the scandals accompanying his private life. The animated dialogue that accompanied the reception of Liszt’s forward-looking music is sadly missing here.

A similar, gossip-oriented approach was taken recently by John Suchet in Beethoven: The Man Revealed (reviewed in these pages, June 2, 2014), and one begins to worry about a new trend in music biography: exploring the saucier sides of composers’ lives, in the manner of social media, to the neglect of their works. For a more balanced view of Liszt, the reader must turn to Alan Walker’s magisterial three-volume biography from the 1980s (Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years 1811-1847; Franz Liszt: The Weimar Years 1848-1861; Franz Liszt: The Final Years 1861-1886), which doesn’t skirt the darker aspects of the composer’s personality but weighs them evenly against his extraordinary achievements. With Walker, we find a pivotal musician who helped change the course of Western music. With Hilmes, we find an often-harried celebrity and superstar who seems to have composed on the side, between road shows and assignations. This makes for lively reading, but one misses the music.

George B. Stauffer is dean of the Mason Gross School of the Arts, and distinguished professor of music history, at Rutgers.