Critics were quick to associate his manner at the keyboard with the excesses of French Romanticism, with Liszt's alliances among litterateurs, artists and musicians such as Balzac, Hugo, George Sand, Delacroix and Berlioz. Liszt's playing was heard as exhilaratingly dramatic, filled with abrupt, unpredictable shifts of style and affect; Thalberg's performances seemed, like the pianist, subject to rational order. Gooley finds these contrasting impressions reflected in contemporary portraits of the two men. A sculpture of Thalberg by Jean-Pierre Dantan the younger shows the virtuoso with a very prominent, neatly coiffed head, but no fewer than twenty fingers, all somehow well under control.
The same artist's familiar sculpture of Liszt is dominated by the pianist's oversized mane in full flight, with virtually no head in view.
If Liszt's playing seemed scattered and histrionic, the central impression left by Thalberg's pianism, Gooley insists (largely dismissing the common multi fingered and -handed image), was "vocality", a vivid imitation of the human voice. But the author sometimes takes the choice of words in his sources too literally, inscribing metaphor into stone. Comparison with the singing voice was one of various figures of speech writers seized on in the effort to describe a musical effect. In 1836, the Paris critic Henri Blanchard, for example, declared that "No one else has ever sung at the piano like Thalberg.
His sound is sustained . . .
such that one imagines oneself to be hearing the expressive bow of (Alexandre) Batta gliding gracefully upon the strings of his cello". Liszt, by contrast, was frequently portrayed as a conquering military hero, a new Caesar, Alexander, or - especially in France -a Napoleon entering a city in triumph and commanding his troops (the orchestra) to a conclusive musical victory that often involved some destruction of the piano. Liszt's repertory reinforced this impression: a favourite "warhorse" pressed into service in his campaign was Weber's Konzertstuck for piano and orchestra, its grand military march made all the grander in Liszt's arrangement.
The military theme took on a different colouring during 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. Gooley claims to be the first to disentangle the roles of the various competing factions in Liszt's Hungarian reception, and thus to clarify its larger political implications. In a wider context, the conferral of the sabre turned out to be, well, something of a double-edged sword: papers in Paris and Vienna saw it as a repudiation of Liszt's supposed loyalties to both the French and the Germans -for they, too, had claimed him -and of liberal progressivism in favour of a narrow, backward-looking militaristic movement in a marginal land. But the cartoonists, at least, could now picture him seated at the piano with the formidable weapon dangling from his belt.
Liszt's re-engagement with Hungary had actually begun with the Vienna concert series of 1838, put on for the benefit of flood victims in Pest. This was one of many contributions he made to charitable causes, including benefits for the completion of Cologne Cathedral and for establishing the Beethoven Monument in Bonn. Gooley devotes a good bit of space to Liszt as philanthropist, but doubts his good intentions:
Liszt was capitalizing on charity the same way he capitalized on the cult of Napoleon or on opera melodies from Don Giovanni and Robert le Diable. He identified a disposition embedded in the minds and emotions of the contemporary publics, and generated public support by addressing his virtuosity to that disposition.
