THE VIRTUOSO LISZT. By Dana Gooley. 280pp. Cambridge University Press. £45 (US $75). - 0 521 83443 0
Mania and militarism in the life of Liszt
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 Merite, 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. The press in many cities -with Paris in the lead -offered detailed reports of these adventures, sometimes with a strong dose of sarcasm, and cartoonists everywhere rejoiced.
What was it about Liszt's playing and person that stirred such excitement? He was but one of many piano virtuosi, most of them also born in Central or Eastern Europe and operating mainly out of Paris, which, after the July Days of
1830, had once again become the European centre of fashion for everything from music to couture and cuisine. Except for Chopin, these other pianists have largely slipped into obscurity: Henri Herz, Theodor Doehler, Johann Peter Pixis, even Liszt's chief rival, Sigismund Thalberg, who in 1837 competed with him in a celebrated piano "duel" at the Paris salon of the colourful Italian emigree Princess Cristina Belgiojoso-Trivulzio (said to have entertained both Heinrich Heine and the aged General Lafayette in her boudoir). All these pianists toured widely and successfully; Herz travelled even more widely than Liszt, performing in South America in 1845 and shortly thereafter in some 400 concerts in the United States.
Nor did their repertories greatly differ: all offered standard favourites by contemporary composers such as Weber and Hummel, together with a good many of their own compositions, prominent among them the fantasies and variations on favourite melodies from current operas.
(Schumann, who detested the genre, once referred to such variations as a tune in "four or five successive states of watery decomposition".) Liszt added to his programmes works of older composers, and piano paraphrases of songs and symphonies, but this does not seem to account for the extremes of audience reaction.
