Surely this is too harsh. Liszt seems in general to have been a benevolent sort, who responded with sympathy in situations where he had nothing to gain.
He was known for his generosity to fellow musicians, including the very difficult Wagner who showed up on his doorstep in Weimar after participating in the Dresden insurrection of 1849. If anything, Liszt sometimes lent himself to causes, such as the nebulous projects of the Saint-Simonians in Paris and the special interests of his hosts in Pest, without sufficient discernment.
When Liszt arrived in Berlin in 1841, the city was brimming with opposing political and social factions. In a volatile Vormarz climate a conservative militarist aristocracy confronted Junges Deutschland and proto-Socialist groups anticipating the revolutions of 1848-9. A new king, Friedrich Wilhelm IV, yearned nostalgically for the German Middle Ages and for monarchy by divine sanction. A central project of his was state-sponsored high culture; an appeal, that is, to the best instincts of the citizenry, to the hallowed concept of Bildung. To this end, the Court underwrote revivals of Sophocles and Shakespeare, summoning Ludwig Tieck to ensure authentic staging, and Mendelssohn to provide fitting incidental music. It seems emblematic of the times that, for the inaugural university lecture by the idealist Friedrich Schelling (another recent import), both Friedrich Engels and the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin were in attendance.
Gooley shows how Liszt and the Berlin populace needed to re-interpret the composer's usual public persona. Since the pianist as a new Napoleon would hardly do, his admirers saw him more as Frederick the Great, or maybe Frederick's nephew, Louis Ferdinand, the soldier- musician who fell at the Battle of Saalfeld.
But Gooley's sketch of the political and social climate surrounding the virtuoso in the Prussian capital is less satisfying than his assessment of the situation in Paris and Budapest. His analysis, focused almost exclusively on the extremes of the Berliners' adulation, takes pretty much at face value the bilious (but delightful) animadversions of Heine, who viewed the events from Paris. Following Heine and the radical Frankfurt critic Ernst Dronke, Dana Gooley sees in Berlin a communal illness, a psychological affliction brought on by political repression and paralysing social regimentation. He cites Habermas's diagnosis of the underlying problem: the lack, as yet, of a "bourgeois public sphere". But this is much too facile. Absence of a "bourgeois public sphere" still prevailed in most European cities for most of the nineteenth century -which is Habermas's point -and Liszt's reception in Berlin differed from that elsewhere more in degree than in kind. Furthermore, the city received him with relative indifference on his return in 1843, when neither Liszt nor the social order could have changed much, and Berliners would scarcely have had time to recover from their "disease".
The Virtuoso Liszt is not free of critical jargon, most evident when the matter at hand touches directly on the interests of other critics and theoreticians.
Novel verbs, "to thematize" and "delegitimate", join a repertory that includes "to emblematize", "to gender", "to code" (as in "both were coded Parisian"), and "to construct" ("writers at the Humorist, then, constructed Liszt as a German"). The gestures and motions of a performing virtuoso, as well as the comportment of the audience, occasion talk of that favoured object of critical discourse: "the body". But in the end these are minor disturbances in a responsible piece of historical and interpretative writing, a valuable contribution to our understanding of Liszt and the forces that made his remarkable career possible.
