Liszt's technical wizardry at the keyboard -perhaps even more striking in his improvisations than in the published scores -surely played a major role in catapulting him to fame. In his paraphrase of Schubert's "Erlkonig" he added terrifying octave-doublings of the scales in the left hand to the notoriously exhausting repeated right-hand octaves of the original. And he came up with novel keyboard effects such as the simulation of a chromatic glissando -a manifest impossibility -with a glissando on the white keys in one hand together with a parallel scale on the black ones in the other. But all the piano virtuosi had their own tricks. Thalberg popularized a keyboard texture in which the melody in a middle register, in single notes or octaves, was festooned with arpeggios and other figurations above and below, resulting in a powerful reinforcement of the melody's upper partials and a sonority of singular resonance.
It sounded, said the critics, as if Thalberg had (at least) three hands, and the cartoonists again had a fine time of it. All the other virtuosi, including Liszt, soon used this keyboard texture and made it routine (a tame example is the main theme of Liebestraum No 3, which, though a transcription of a song, is one of Liszt's best-known piano pieces).
But there was clearly something more about Liszt's concerts, about his very presence in a city, that caused a stir; he had about him a charisma and drama that seldom failed to touch a nerve. Attempts to describe this effect resorted to metaphors of war, intimations of the demonic, or uneasy thoughts about psycho- sexual forces. This, the vivid and composite image that attached to Liszt as he made his triumphant rounds, is the subject of Dana Gooley's engaging book, The Virtuoso Liszt. The reader will find little here about music and not very much about its performance. This is a study of "reception", of the social, political and psychological factors at work in image-making, and of Liszt's sometimes active, sometimes almost unwitting, participation in the process. Gooley tells us in his afterword that he began with the idea of studying how Liszt may have anticipated the modern "popular star" -presumably of the movie or rock varieties. But a closer inquiry into the historical background of the phenomenon led him to conclude that Liszt's "popularity rested on unfamiliar premises quite specific to the 1830s and 1840s". This was a reasonable conclusion, surely, and Gooley's book profits greatly from his determination to understand historical context, and from his industry in seeking out the supporting sources.
The author pays close attention to only a limited part of the already short period of Liszt's greatest triumphs: the antecedent events in Paris in the later 1830s, with extended analysis of the Liszt-Thalberg rivalry; the pianist's return to an adoring Hungary in 1839-40; and the furore in Berlin of
1841-2. Within these contexts Gooley focuses in turn on a series of central themes: the roles of various Parisian social strata in championing Liszt or his main rival, the political forces at work in the Hungarians' gleeful appropriation of this virtuoso of ambiguous nationality, socio-political factors that spurred the hyperventilating ovations in Berlin, and a perception of Liszt as a servant of charitable causes.
Sigismund Thalberg, a pianist of uncertain origins -though reputedly of noble but illegitimate birth -burst on the Paris scene at the end of 1835 and was quickly hailed in some quarters as the world's foremost piano virtuoso. Liszt, then in Geneva with the Countess Marie d'Agoult, probably had not yet heard Thalberg play, but responded all the same with a long and damaging article about his compositions in the Paris Revue et gazette musicale. Thus began a rivalry, much inflamed by the press, that culminated in the duel staged in 1837 by the Princess Belgiojoso. Its outcome has been variously assessed, but what everyone remembered was the Princess's airy bon mot, "Thalberg is the first pianist in the world; Liszt is the only one". Gooley convincingly describes these events as disturbances of a distinct "masterplan" which Liszt had formulated for his career in the mid-1830s: a determination to limit his public playing for a time so as to distinguish himself first as a composer and man of letters, thereby putting some necessary distance between himself and the other pianists, before launching his true career as a virtuoso. Thalberg's alarming rise to prominence cut these plans short, and hastened the launch of Liszt's own concert tours.
Gooley portrays the two virtuosi as starkly different in style and image.
Thalberg, the favourite of the dilettante aristocracy addicted to opera at the Theatre des Italiens, worked his wonders at the keyboard with an air of tasteful restraint and good manners. Liszt, who appealed greatly to intellectuals and artists, was, as Gooley says, given to the large gesture: "In performance he stamped his feet, lifted his arms far above the keyboard, and on the whole denied his body a stable centre of gravity".
