TLS 10-14-05: The Virtuoso Liszt

 

By Dana Gooley

Franz Liszt, still often thought the greatest of all pianists, made his mark as an international virtuoso mainly during a period of less than a decade. From 1838 to 1847 he criss-crossed Europe with frenetic energy, presenting more than 1,000 concerts from Madrid to St Petersburg, from Constantinople to Manchester. Heads of state conferred on him singular honours: the Order of Carlos II in Madrid, the Order of the Lion of Belgium in Brussels, the “sabre of honour” in Pest, and (perhaps with rather different implications ) two trained bears from Tsar Nicholas I in St Petersburg. Tumultuous ovations greeted him almost everywhere.

In 1838, a series of six concerts in Vienna became ten by popular demand; Berlin in 1841–2 enjoyed a ten-week stretch of twenty-one concerts, filled to overflowing, at which Liszt performed some eighty works. Especially in that city, Liszt seems to have aroused a kind of hysteria, for which Heine coined a name, “Lisztomanie”. Well-situated women collected the pianist’s hair-clippings, it was said, and wore his discarded cigar butts on their persons; he received the Ordre Pour le Mérite, and departed the city along Unter den Linden in a procession of thirty carriages drawn by white horses, as the King and Queen of Prussia waved from a palace window...

Liszt’s visit to Hungary in 1839–40. Though born in that country (of German-speaking parents), he had as an adolescent taken up residence in Paris, and had never thought of himself as Hungarian, nor spoken the language. Yet on Liszt’s first visit to that country since childhood, the conservative Magyar political forces, aflame with nationalist enthusiasms, hailed him as a national hero and conferred on him the sabre of honour....

see full text in the TLS the October 14 2005 issue and the book description at the Cambridge University Press site.