A Singer’s Guide to the Great Composers: Liszt
Liszt and Lisztomania
The Great Comet of 1811 was nearing the end of its visibility when Franz Liszt was born in October of that year. Whether this was an omen as some people suggested is unknown. Nevertheless the boy born in Raiding in Burgenland in Austria/Hungary became one of the most famous composers in the world, a figure of immense significance in Western music, a virtuoso pianist who made members of his audience swoon with emotion, a 19th century Tom Jones or Mick Jagger, as it were.
He only composed a few songs and a couple of sacred works, so he shouldn’t really be included in my survey of vocal composers. However, research into his life for a recent review of a piano recital in the Edinburgh Festival by Mariam Batsashvili (see my review on EMR), brought home to me just what an influence Liszt exerted on 19th century music, and how this influence has shaped the musical history of the past 200 years. Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Wagner, Chopin, Debussy – these were just a few of the famous people Liszt knew personally, as well as great figures from literature, art and politics. A few years ago, I gave a recital in the Edinburgh Festival (along with one of my excellent students from St Andrews University, Catherine Hooper, and the fine accompanist Walther Blair), amusingly (as I thought) entitled ‘Brahms and Liszt’, featuring songs by those two composers. I had never sung any Liszt, and, while not being on the same level as Brahms, his music proved to be interesting and worth exploring. As I delved more into his life and work, I became fascinated by this famous Hungarian, whose first language was German and who preferred to speak French as his language of choice. Famously, he announced to an audience in Budapest, “Je suis Hongrois”, using French as he spoke no Hungarian!
Franz’s father, Adam, was a musician too, playing piano, violin, cello and guitar, and had been in the service of Prince Nikolaus II Esterhazy, the last employer of Haydn. Nikolaus had revived the tradition of a musical establishment at Eisenstadt, supporting Haydn and commissioning a Mass from Beethoven (which he famously hated, deeming it “ridiculous and detestable” - an interesting take on a genius). Incidentally, he also maintained a private brothel for his own entertainment (!) and suffered financial ruin late in life (facts which are not unconnected).
However, Adam Liszt benefited from his largesse, being personally acquainted with Haydn and Beethoven, thus setting a precedent for his son’s amazing set of acquaintances during his life. The young Franz attracted attention from an early age, and was soon sent to study, aged 9, in Vienna with Carl Czerny, himself a student of Beethoven and Hummel. In addition, he studied composition with Antonio Salieri (Mozart’s nemesis in fiction but actually director of music at the royal court), and made his playing debut in Vienna, aged 11, with great success. He met Schubert and Beethoven and was generally feted as a prodigy.
When Adam died in 1827, Franz and his mother moved to Paris, where he gave lessons to earn money. Despite their poverty, the Liszts seemed to move in high artistic circles, as young Franz met Victor Hugo, Lamartine and Heine, and he encountered Hector Berlioz the day before the French composer premiered his Symphonie Fantastique. He began to compose in earnest and started his famous series of transcriptions for piano of other composers’ works. Having met the violin virtuoso, Niccolo Paganini, he determined to become as famous, as a piano virtuoso. His reputedly enormous hands, with a huge span of notes on the keyboard, allowed him to play previously unplayable music, some of which he composed himself! At this time too he became friends with the young Polish genius, Frédéric Chopin, almost an exact contemporary, and together, they charged the battlements of piano playing!
Like many 19th century heroes, Chopin suffered an untimely death, dying probably of TB at the age of 39. He packed a lot into his life both musically and romantically and visited Scotland just before his death. Backed by the wealthy Scottish heiress, Jane Stirling, he undertook a British tour the year before he died and played to great acclaim in Glasgow and Edinburgh. His friendship with Liszt seems to have been one of mutual appreciation, although professional jealousies crept in, as well as romantic ones. They grew apart after one of Liszt’s concerts featured a typical Lisztian improvisation of one of Chopin’s piano works, the Polish pianist objecting to his Hungarian friend’s embellishments, and demanding he played the notes written and not those in his head!
Liszt’s success as a virtuoso was twofold. His playing was undeniably brilliant and set him apart from his contemporaries, and indeed his successors, as he achieved his goal of at least parity in the fame stakes with Paganini. However, what made him stand out for posterity was the public acclaim he garnered everywhere he played. Many portraits of Liszt show him as a middle aged or old man, looking every inch the stalwart Victorian genius with his silver hair and haughty look. As a young man, however, he was the epitome of the romantic hero. Tall and slim, with a shock of dark hair styled in that famous Lisztian way, he was a genuine superstar. There are many accounts of swooning females at his concerts, amid noisy protestations of adoration. Whether underwear was thrown is less likely, due to the prevailing sensibilities of the era, but you get the drift!
An account of a concert he gave at the age of about 20 notes - “Mr Liszt’s playing contains abandonment, a liberated feeling…..He is the enemy of affected, stilted, contorted expressions….his touch has an indescribable charm!” Heady stuff, and very typical of the reactions to his playing. He was also clearly, from an early age, little concerned with the conventions of interpretation, as there are many descriptions of his embellishments of other composers’ work, and indeed, his complete rewriting at times. Berlioz noted that, in a performance of the first movement of Beethoven’s ‘Moonlight Sonata’, that miracle of simplicity and restraint, Liszt would add cadenzas, tremolos and trills ad lib! Although often including chamber music, or accompanying singers or instrumentalists, his concerts became notable for the variety and extravagance of his solo playing, and he seems, single-handedly, to have invented the solo piano recital, thus adding to the mystique of the romantic genius, the star performer.
A series of high-profile affairs included a long relationship with the Countess Marie d’Agoult, which produced three children, the most notable of whom, Cosima, first married the superstar conductor Hans von Bülow, then left him to marry Richard Wagner. Liszt then met the Polish Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein on a concert tour to Kiev, and this meeting changed his life. She persuaded him to give up his playing career and devote himself to composition. So at 35 the greatest virtuoso the world had seen ceased to play in public. From 1842 until 1861, Liszt was Kapellmeister at the court of Weimar, that marvellous town in Thuringia in central Germany, which had seen both Schiller and Goethe (two of the finest poets in any era) living a few hundred yards apart, and which crops up time and time again in German cultural and political history. I auditioned there (unsuccessfully) for the role of Baron Ochs in Strauss’ ‘Der Rosenkavalier’ some years ago and spent a lovely couple of days exploring this enchanting place. Liszt and Carolyne were determined to marry, but the Princess could not manage to divorce her husband, who with the assistance of the Tsar of Russia, succeeded in frustrating the couple, intervening the day before their proposed wedding in Rome in 1860 by going to the Pope himself.
Shortly after this huge disappointment, two of Liszt’s children died, and he announced his renunciation of temporal life, retreating to a monastery outside Rome, where he took holy orders, taking on the moniker of the Abbé Liszt. He composed several religious works and conducted spiritual concerts in Rome. Invited back to Weimar to hold masterclasses in piano, he began a period of teaching and travelling which must have been exhausting. In addition to Weimar and Rome, he started teaching at the Academy in Budapest, where the authorities were determined to exploit his Hungarian background. As one of the world’s most famous Hungarians (although, as mentioned, unable to speak the language!), people there wanted to promote their independent culture through his example. During this time, Liszt wrote essays and treatises on a wide variety of subjects (although it was suspected that Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein was closely involved in the writing), and his championing of the New German School was both influential and controversial.
A speech by Franz Brendel in 1859 was the catalyst for the so-called War of the Romantics, when the New German School (changing its name from the provocative title, Music of the Future, which had previously been favoured) proclaimed its dominance over musical development. Simply put (although anything but simple), the speech declared that programmatic music, represented by Wagner and Liszt (with nods to Berlioz), notably tone poems and opera, was the way of the future. Ranged against this was the conservative group, championed by Joachim, Brahms, Clara Schumann and others, who defended the status of pure music. Arguments raged on both sides, as characters changed sides (famously Berlioz, who came to hate Wagner’s music) and protested loudly. It even became a geographical debate, as the Weimar school (around Liszt) and the Leipzig school (founded by Mendelssohn), attacked each other. Beethoven was the fount of all this, each side claiming him as their mentor. The Austrian critic, Eduard Hanslick, who had earlier been a great fan of Wagner’s music, became more and more antagonistic, and fell deeper into the Brahms camp. Shockingly, Wagner proclaimed Hanslick’s Jewishness as problematic, suggesting that he could not appreciate real German music due to his semitic heritage. The original name for the pernickety and ultra-conservative mastersinger, Sixtus Beckmesser, in Wagner’s opera ‘Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg’ was Veit Hanslich! His hatred of the New School meant that he was an implacable foe of that gentle man, Anton Bruckner, causing the Austrian composer much heartache.
Liszt, still living in Weimar for a good part of the year, was the de facto leader of the New German School (even though Hungarian – figure that out!) and was the accepted figurehead. When he became Wagner’s father-in-law (Wagner and Cosima lived together from 1863, marrying in 1870), the two composers were hugely important stars in the German, and indeed world, music firmament. The conductor, Hans von Bülow, originally a disciple of Wagner, was an early member of the New German School, conducting the world premiere of ‘Tristan und Isolde’ in 1865, although by this time deeply suspicious of his wife’s relationship with Wagner, he was becoming understandably confused! When Cosima asked for a divorce in 1868, he initially refused, but after the birth of Wagner and Cosima’s third child Siegfried in 1869, he relented with the astonishing words, “You have preferred to consecrate the treasures of your heart and mind to a higher being”. Talk about magnanimity! Mind you, he never spoke to Wagner again! Indeed, he became an opponent of the New German School, championing Brahms and Tchaikovsky.
A fascinating discovery: for the winter season 1877/78, von Bülow was appointed conductor of the subscription concerts presented at the newly opened St Andrews Hall in Glasgow, by the Glasgow Choral Union. He conducted several concerts in Glasgow, Edinburgh and Aberdeen, including the newly revised Brahms First Symphony. Soon, he took over the Meiningen Court Orchestra in Germany, where he met Richard Strauss, engaging him as second conductor, and where he conducted notable premieres, including Brahms’ Fourth Symphony and Strauss’ Wind Suite.
Returning to Liszt, I have not sung much of his music, in fact just a few of his songs, but he is such a central figure in musical history that I hope you will forgive the indulgence of an article about him.
The songs by Liszt that I have sung are interesting and display a good grasp of word setting. It was fascinating to realise that his famous ‘Liebesträume’, works for solo piano from 1850, were originally composed as songs, and the one I sang, ‘O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst’, to a poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath, a paean to mature love, involved a serious piece of piano playing by my accompanist. The ‘Lorelei’, sung by Catherine Hooper, is a splendid 19th century ballad, and I liked Liszt’s version of Goethe’s great poem, ‘Wanderers Nachtlied’ (‘Űber allen Gipfeln ist Ruh’), very different from Schubert’s sublime setting, but interesting, nonetheless. Catherine also sang a French setting, demonstrating Liszt’s complete absorption of that language and style.
His tone poems are rightly commended, but I suppose it is his piano music that will stand as his finest monument. I adore his ‘Années de Pèlerinage’, a set of three suites exploring every facet of the piano, and his piano transcriptions of other composers’ masterworks are wonderful. He wrote important organ works and a Requiem. His symphonic poems stand out as experimental endeavours towards a new sort of music, laying down markers for Richard Strauss and others to explore further, and, in his late works, he reached out to atonality and dissonance, in an uncanny premonition of the future.
His legacy is enormous, and the simple fact that he knew, personally, most of the great figures of 19th century music is astonishing. Berlioz, Wagner, Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann, Chopin, Grieg, Glinka, Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Paganini – these are only a few of his famous acquaintances. His great grandson, Wieland Wagner, transformed the production of opera after the Second World War at Bayreuth, a process continued less successfully by Wieland’s brother, Wolfgang, whom I briefly met at that marvellous place as a stipendiary in 1990.
