The brief biographical sketch of Liszt by Ludwig Rellstab, which comes at the end of a modest volume in which he gathered together his essays on Liszt’s Berlin performances during the early months of 1842, originally published in the Vossische Zeitung, is one of a small group of biographies of Liszt that appeared during his virtuoso years. These some half-dozen publications, in both French and German, began with Joseph d’Ortigue’s biography published in the Gazette musicale de Paris, in June 1835. Only in 1843 did a second biography in French appear, by one J. Duverger, which, as we shall see, has interesting connections to Rellstab’s. In between these two works there appeared, in addition to several biographical notices in standard musical lexicons, biographies in German by Johann Wilhelm Christern and Gustav Schilling, as well as Rellstab’s. All coincided with Liszt’s tours of Germany in the early 1840s.
It is easy to dismiss these contemporary reports as inaccurate and misleading. More often than not they are consigned to the dustbin of history as unworthy relics, to be superseded by the cold and objective truth of modern scholarship.1 More recently the tide has changed. Scholars have begun to recognize how significantly these accounts mirror the social and cultural fabric through which Liszt’s public persona, in all its complexity and contradiction, was fashioning itself during his most active years as a virtuoso.2 What lends these early works particular relevance, however, is that Liszt was often on friendly terms with their authors, involving himself in one way or another with their biographical projects.
In the summer of 1834, Liszt was becoming more self-aware and focused about his artistic goals, attempting to create a self-image that would reflect his ideas about art and society. He spent nearly a month in the fall at La Chênaie with Abbé Félicité-Robert de Lamennais, to whom he had been introduced by d’Ortigue, and whose views on the relationship of religion and the arts were appealing. Only weeks before the appearance of d’Ortigue’s biography, Liszt, using Marie d’Agoult as his collaborator, had presented himself to the French public as an author, with the first part of his De la situation des artistes et de leur condition dans la société.3 Perhaps it was Marie herself who suggested the idea of a biography at so opportune a time; both would have found d’Ortigue a more than acceptable biographical agent.
After the events in Pest in January 1840 surrounding the presentation of the sword of honor to Liszt, and the ensuing furor in the Parisian press, Liszt attempted to encourage large-scale accounts of his concert activities and to exercise greater influence over projected biographies.4 Indeed, establishing an acceptable biographical image in the press would become an important part of his strategies of self-management. By April he had already approached his friend Franz von Schober, an eyewitness to the events in Pest, urging him to publish an account of them that he knew would be sympathetic. Realizing that he had gone too far, he wrote to Schober on January 3 explaining, “I am afraid I was very indiscreet in asking you to be so good as to undertake this work…. But I will not speak of it anymore.”5 But speak of it he did, at the end of August: “A propos of Hungarian! I shall always value highly the work on my sojourn in Pest.”6 Schober eventually agreed to Liszt’s proposal, in the form of a collection of articles on the Hungarian concerts he had written for the German press in 1842, which were published the following year as Briefe über F. Liszts Aufenthalt in Ungarn.
Liszt was more than pleased with Schober’s chronicle of his Hungarian sojourn, but felt that unless at least some version of it could be adapted for the French press, it remained only a partial solution to the kind of damage control he was seeking. In the meantime, a second opportunity for a new, German biography arose in the person of Johann Christern, a prolific but uninspired Hamburg music teacher and composer, though, as a writer on musical subjects, not much more than a hardworking dilettante.7 Christern was enthusiastic enough about Liszt’s playing, which he had heard in Hamburg in the autumn of 1840 and again in the fall of 1841, and enterprising enough to want to capitalize on the excitement generated by the most prolonged series of concerts Liszt had given so far in Germany, nine in all, and to prepare a biography for Liszt’s German audiences. It is hard to say how much contact or discussion Liszt had with Christern. There is little evidence of the “authentic reports” promised on the title page. Profit was certainly a factor, at least for the publisher, Schuberth, for a list of Liszt’s compositions is added as an appendix, with a reminder attached that two of the works listed were published by Schuberth and the whole list available from the publisher. In this connection, the rather bold statement in the first paragraph of the foreword, that Liszt was as great a composer as he was a virtuoso, makes some degree of sense.8
Christern’s biography appeared, it has been estimated, sometime during the last two months of 1841, and it is doubtful whether Liszt had the time or inclination to occupy himself with it much beyond those months.9 With his sights fixed squarely on Berlin, his thoughts would have turned to Ludwig Rellstab, the most widely read and influential music critic in the Prussian capital, whose well-known dislike of virtuosos would have made him a likely adversary Liszt could not afford to overlook. Although Rellstab is most often remembered today for having invented the title of “Moonlight” for Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in C-sharp Minor, op. 27, no. 2, and, with more justification, for having provided the texts for the first seven songs of Schubert’s Schwanengesang, he was astonishingly prolific as music critic, novelist, poet, and librettist. Indeed, there are no fewer than twenty-four volumes in the complete edition of his works. Although he studied piano with Ludwig Berger and theory with Bernhard Klein, both devoted to Beethoven and his legacy, Rellstab began his career as an artillery officer before turning to writing. In 1826 he became principal critic for the Vossische Zeitung, a post he held for more than two decades. Stylistically his critical writing is subjective, often impressionistic, and, under the influence of Jean Paul, the German Romantic poet whom he adored, it can be dense, bitingly ironic, and at times obscure. Although cosmopolitan in outlook, he is generally considered conservative in his musical and aesthetic sympathies. His dislike of Italian opera and the Rossini craze is well-known. In addition to Mozart, Haydn, and the early and middle works of Beethoven, he admired Cherubini, Weber, and Mendelssohn. Of the newer Romanticism he was wary and often critical.
Liszt’s letter to Marie d’Agoult on 6 January, the day following his third appearance in Berlin in only five days, conveys how much thought he had given not only to Rellstab’s reviews but to a meeting with Rellstab himself: “Here are some newspapers. I prefer to send you Rellstab’s articles because Rellstab ought to be an adversary of mine. He is the critic par excellence in Berlin. I refused to call on him first—after my first concert he came to see me, and although of different minds on a number of points we can get on, as you will see from the lines that he has written about me.”10
What, then, did Liszt find in Rellstab’s reception that so pleased him? Certainly Rellstab’s comparison of his virtuosity with Thalberg’s, in his first review, must have brought him immense satisfaction: “Liszt encompasses all of Thalberg’s abilities within his own. If Liszt doesn’t offer what Thalberg offers, he could certainly do so. And while Liszt could accomplish any task that Thalberg can, the reverse is not true.”11 As for Liszt’s playing on its own terms, Rellstab emphasized a number of traits that would continue to appear like leitmotives in subsequent reviews. For one thing, Rellstab argued, one must speak in poetic, not simply technical terms of Liszt’s playing. Furthermore, Liszt’s virtuosity is not limited to technical mastery alone but is inexorably bound up with his personality and intellect. Where he cannot follow Liszt, however, is his “pronounced lingering over individual traits” at the expense of the whole, as he writes in connection with Liszt’s performance of the “Moonlight” Sonata.12
August Kahlert, in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, not to mention Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Wagner, all drew attention to the willful self-absorption that was so prominent a force in Liszt’s playing.13 But whereas Mendelssohn reacts with biting sarcasm to Liszt’s utter disregard of the text of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata in C Minor, op. 30, no. 2, and Schumann expresses moral outrage at Liszt’s “obstinate independence” in a performance of the “Emperor” Concerto, Rellstab remains evenhanded and detached, even generous in the degree to which he allows Liszt his point of view.14 He has many critical things to say, for example, about Liszt’s performance of the “Moonlight” Sonata, one that is “not so much Beethoven’s Sonata as what Liszt finds deepest within his own self about it, how it has stimulated and shaken him up.”15 He goes on to remark, in an unusual show of critical generosity, that nevertheless, “as I have said, Liszt continues to enjoy this right; after all is said and done he could follow no other law. Here criticism is not going to say what ought to be, but only what is.”16
Why was Rellstab so willing to grant so much more leeway to Liszt than to others? In this regard the comparison that Rellstab drew with Paganini is instructive, as is the fact that he included a translation of most of the obituary Liszt wrote upon the violinist’s death in 1840.17 Paganini’s lapses of taste, his errors of judgment, he says, are “inborn,” the result of a “natural instinct,” enclosing him in an “intellectual prison” brought about by his very nature. Liszt’s lapses are merely “inculcated,” “learned,” the result of his youth and inexperience, the excesses he developed during his formative years in Paris. How much this view of Liszt is dictated by his admiration for what he saw as Liszt’s intellectual brilliance, his generosity of spirit, his openness and curiosity, and how much by Liszt’s tactical success in appealing to German nationalistic sentiments is hard to say. Both probably played a role. Of the warm friendship that surely developed between Rellstab and Liszt during those early months of 1842, one should not discount the more personal side, that of the understanding and trust that comes from a gradual recognition of shared experience and ideals. To judge from the biographical sketch alone, it is likely that Rellstab and Liszt spent some time together, going over published biographical material as well as whatever was on Liszt’s mind with respect to Rellstab’s projected biography.18 No doubt common experiences emerged during their discussions that would have brought them together in personal ways. Rellstab’s father, like Liszt’s, wanted a career in music but was forced to abandon the possibility (his father’s illness made it necessary for him to enter the family business). Partly to compensate, again like Adam Liszt, he hoped to realize his thwarted ambition through his son, driving him quite mercilessly in his musical studies.19
Rellstab’s small volume appeared in March 1842 with the title Franz Liszt. Beurtheilungen-Berichte-Lebensskizze. It contains a half-dozen or so individual reviews of concerts, and among the articles that make up the Berichte, more general ones; the concluding “Liszt in Berlin” and “Liszt, ein Ereignis des öffentlichen Lebens,” the longest and most detailed examinations of Liszt’s artistic personality, are the ones to which Rellstab refers in the first paragraph of the biographical sketch translated below.20 Although we do not know all of the circumstances that led to the volume’s creation, we do know that it was at the request of an “unnamed, but easily recognized hand,” as he tells us rather mysteriously in the preface, that Rellstab gathered these writings together. As for the biographical essay, there is some reason to believe that it was Liszt himself who suggested the idea to Rellstab, for it would give Liszt an opportunity to correct what he saw as errors and lapses of judgment on the part of his biographers, a concern that appears quite often in letters to Marie throughout 1842.21 As the reader will see, Liszt contributed valuable information and points of view to Rellstab, although he was, as usual, selective about what he chose to include and ignore.
The publication of Rellstab’s book did not end Liszt’s involvement with biographical projects. He was still keen for a French-language biography, one that would satisfy the French intellectual elite, all the more so in early 1842 with the appearance of biographies by Christern and Rellstab that were making much of his German nationalistic stance. As early as February, he had asked Marie “to take charge as soon and as much as possible with my biography.”22 By November they had formed a plan to incorporate material from both Franz von Schober’s collection of articles on German concerts and Rellstab’s biographical sketch, under Marie’s supervision, into a French-language biography of Liszt.23 It appeared the following April, compiled and written by Marie—Liszt seems to have done little more than edit and reduce the length of the manuscript she submitted—under the first of her noms de plume, J. Duverger.24
Rellstab’s book was treated harshly when it first appeared. Recognizing the value of the biographical sketch, one writer, with barely suppressed sarcasm, expressed surprise that Rellstab, usually a “calm and level-headed man,” could show himself hardly less enthusiastic about Liszt than the “huge number of residents of the Prussian royal city.”25 But Rellstab, it seems, never wavered in his admiration of Liszt the virtuoso.26 Indeed, he does not hesitate some four years later, in his homage to his teacher Ludwig Berger, whose teachings he revered above all others, to express sadness that Berger could not have known Liszt: “He [Berger] would have embraced him, in spite of his lapses of taste and abstruse singularities, with lively appreciation and greeted him with the greatest joy as king of the realm in which he himself was so mighty and noble a ruler.”27
From Franz Liszt: Beurtheilungen—Berichte—Lebensskizze Berlin, J. Petsch, 1842
As we have already mentioned in the preface, we are obliged in this biographical essay by the limitations of space to reduce a more than lavish portrait to no more than a brief outline, even though Liszt’s dazzlingly flamboyant life, deeply turbulent both on the surface and in its depths, a life endlessly puzzling psychologically, calls for the fullest possible treatment. Such a portrait, however, would have to be based on an extended period of work and a long and intellectually close relationship with the artist. A part of the relevant discussion, to which more of his personal circumstances and intellectual periods of development would give rise, is, by the way, obviated by the preceding attempt to present and explain in a general way the artist’s views about life and art.
Liszt was born on 22 October 1811, in the Hungarian village of Raiding, in the district of Oedenburg. His father, Adam Liszt, was employed as a bookkeeping official by Prince Esterházy. With his intelligence and good sense he held fast to a higher aim, however, that far exceeded the circumstances of his life. Gifted with uncommon musical abilities—he played the cello very well and, of course, the violin, and later acquired a creditable proficiency at the piano—the principal happiness of his life was to be in close contact with the great musical talents brought together in the orchestra of Prince Esterházy at Eisenstadt. Adam Liszt lived in close contact with Joseph Haydn, and Hummel, who frequented Eisenstadt over a long period, also numbered among his musical friends; even Cherubini came there a few times. Since Adam Liszt took part in quartet performances and other chamber works, his talent, although that of a dilettante, must have been first-rate in view of the fact that he was able to hold his own in the presence of such professionals. The musical abilities of his son are at least in part a handsome legacy that nature all the more generously bestowed on him in the richest abundance.
Franz Liszt was the only child of his parents, their entire hope and their entire happiness. This was especially true for his father, who brooded endlessly over his own failed career, and thus thought all the more about directing his son toward what he himself had been deprived of. Franz was expected to become something significant, something that would stand out above the ordinary, although, to be sure, something as yet undecided. In light of the respect enjoyed by the clerical state, especially in the Catholic denomination, the sensitive temperament of the boy may have led his father to the thought that his son had aspirations toward the church. He asked him once, “Do you want to become a priest, Franz?” “No, I don’t want to become a priest.” “Then such a man as this one?” the father went on, indicating the portrait of Gluck and other famous musicians that hung in the room. “Yes, I would like to become such a man.” How right it seems that the boy’s wish was guided by an inner desire, a wish that he himself had hardly grasped!
The following event gives a decisive indication of his musical talent. One day Adam played the Concerto in C-sharp Minor of Ries; Franz, leaning on the instrument, listened with fierce attentiveness. In the evening, during a walk in the garden, he sang the melody of the theme. This ability to remember a by-no-means simple series of musical tones in one so young, in one whose memory was still untrained, was a sign of the most significant talent. It was at this point that his father gave in to his son’s urgent pleas and began instruction with him on the piano. Franz was then six years old, so his musical instruction did not begin at an excessively early age, certainly to his good fortune.
In several biographical sketches it is reported that during this time and in the years following a tendency toward religious fervor already exhibited itself in the boy. Liszt indicates that these reports are thoroughly erroneous, especially the reference in the Universal-Lexikon der Tonkunst that he had at the time already read Chateaubriand’s René and been profoundly moved by it, that he had sought solitude and had spent half a year in a deeply melancholic mood. There is no doubting these circumstances, but they occurred some ten years later, when he had already been living in Paris for a while. Tenderness and gentleness were, to be sure, in spite of the boy’s liveliness, predominant in his character, but not so much as to lead him in any way, at that time, to spiritual eccentricities.
His musical progress under the guidance of his father was remarkable. After three years of instruction, his playing was so exceptional that he was able to appear in public. A concert in Oedenburg was arranged, in which he performed the Concerto in E-flat Major of Ries and a free fantasy, amid the enthusiastic applause of an astonished audience. That he was stricken with the “old fever,” as it is referred to in some biographies, immediately before he began to play, is something the artist is unable to recall. Although he became ill several times with attacks of fever in this period of his boyhood, it seems to us that people have attributed too much importance to what is no more than a chance occurrence.28
There is no truth to the account, repeated everywhere, that Prince Esterházy presented the young virtuoso with a gift of 50 ducats. Because of his relationship with Adam Liszt, the Prince may have been the individual most likely to support Franz’s talent, a talent blossoming, so to speak, under his very authority, but he disregarded rather than supported it. It was rather the Hungarian Counts Amadé and Zapary who, with the most worthy and genuine appreciation of the boy’s rare talent, offered him, after a brilliantly successful concert in Pressburg, a yearly stipend of 600 florins C.M. for a period of six years.29 It was this stipend that enabled the father to resign his position and, freed from other obligations, to pursue his plans for his son’s artistic education. Of course, neither of these noble-minded men could have known what rich fruit this seed would eventually bear; indeed, they have without question earned the thanks of the entire world of music.
It was in Vienna, in 1821, with this help, that the boy’s talent was able to develop further. Although already overwhelmed with his teaching duties, Carl Czerny, with truly noble unselfishness, was prepared to take charge of the boy’s training at the keyboard, while Salieri took charge of his studies in composition. Thinking it probable that, as far as fundamental problems of technique were concerned, there was still much catching up for his brilliant student, Czerny gave him at first Clementi sonatas and, it is true, the easier ones. This injured the young virtuoso’s pride, however, because he was certainly able to play them at sight without hesitation. As for Czerny, he was not happy with details of execution, with touch, fingering, and so on, and held the talented boy, who wanted so urgently to press on ahead, to these indispensable fundamentals with absolute strictness. Because of this, ill feeling arose in the boy at first, and he devised various sly tricks in order to escape from what appeared to him as tyrannical and humiliating schooling. He thus wrote down bad fingerings for himself and then complained to his father about his teacher, who was demanding something so incorrect from him. But before long the schism was healed when more difficult tasks were put before the ambitious boy, and both affection and trust were restored.
Meanwhile, Liszt was hard at work composing. Although Salieri did not put him through a rigorous study of counterpoint, a direction in music in which he himself was not entirely at ease, he nonetheless lavished real affection on him, keeping him working diligently on genuine exercises in composition. He had him write small sacred pieces—Liszt still remembers a Tantum ergo, for example, that he composed under the supervision of his teacher—and also worked with him on score reading, how to accompany, and so on. After a year and a half of the most diligent study, during which the young virtuoso frequently aroused the astonishment of musical connoisseurs—he once played, among other things, at sight and without once faltering, the Concerto in B Minor of Hummel, one of the most demanding works for the piano—the moment apparently arrived when he was ready to be heard successfully in Vienna. Indeed, the fame of this remarkably endowed boy had already spread throughout the entire imperial city, even as far as the solitary Beethoven, to whom he was introduced by Professor Schindler, his well-known biographer. According to Schindler’s own account, Beethoven is supposed not to have been exactly friendly during this visit, whereas Liszt really does not recall having encountered anything unfriendly on the part of the great master, whose innermost nature was invariably full of love. Beethoven even attended the young virtuoso’s concert, arranged soon after, something extremely rare given his total seclusion and his melancholy disposition, and gave him the most decisive, though in its way the most formal sign of praise.30
The audience erupted nevertheless with the greatest enthusiasm, overwhelming the astonishingly talented boy with the most generous tribute of applause. As a result, Adam Liszt thought it appropriate to arrange a second concert soon after. These two concerts took place in Town Hall and in the small Redoutensaal. Liszt played the Concertos in A Minor and B Minor of Hummel as well as several other pieces, and a free fantasy, which he was especially fond of doing in those years, constructing them in the most felicitous ways.31
The success of these two concerts provided Adam Liszt with the means to continue his son’s education under even more favorable circumstances, by transplanting it to a more important setting. Paris was the goal toward which Adam Liszt, as circumspect as he was zealously ambitious, was aspiring. In spite of many a spectacular decline, Paris was still the training ground for the most thorough musical education, indeed the most stimulating and varied scene when it came to the arts. In 1823, he journeyed to Paris by way of Munich and Stuttgart, where Liszt performed publicly to the greatest applause, yet where, having grown into the most astonishingly complete and unique artist that we now recognize him to be, he has not been heard since his early years of training.
To provide his son with the Conservatory’s outstanding musical training was the father’s chief purpose in departing for Paris. Cherubini, however, who stood at the head of this institution, denied him admission on grounds that he was foreign. We will not go into the matter of whether this admittedly existing rule could bear no exception. We refuse to believe it, inasmuch as Cherubini himself was not native-born. Cherubini’s bitter isolation and dismissive nature may well be at least partly responsible. This initial setback, however, was in no way damaging to his success. Liszt became quickly well-known through his talent, and after having played to the greatest acclaim before the Duke of Orleans, the present King of France, became everyone’s object of admiration, and the highest social circles fought for the privilege of paying homage to the astonishing child. Gold, fame, adulation poured down on him with equal immoderation not simply because he was a musical prodigy, but also on account of his other intellectual gifts, which aroused the greatest interest. Even if the triumph was genuinely earned, the extravagance of the reception plainly presented dangerous pitfalls for the boy’s intellectual development. Nevertheless, the serious opposition of a strong, thoroughly noble and unselfish will, from a father who kept only the highest artistic goals in view, a father blessed by nature to his very core with a good heart, were the best defenses against these dangers. His son happily put behind him the critical transition from childhood to youth.
With respect to music, Liszt had made continuous and painstaking progress in the intervening years. He studied counterpoint with Reicha for more than a year, proceeding as far as its most complex procedures, a direction that he nevertheless openly admits to subsequently abandoning as something less appealing to his nature, and therefore more or less losing the confidence he had once acquired in it. His father had him do exercises conscientiously. He thus had to play among other things a number of Bach fugues every afternoon, a practice to which we owe perhaps the truly marvelous mastery with which he still performs to this day this most difficult of tasks. Often he had to transpose these to other keys, something which, as stated in the Lexikon der Tonkunst, was “child’s play” for him.*
Liszt made several trips from Paris, in particular two to England, which brought him, in addition to the acclaim that was as frequent there as in France, a broadening of his artistic views in many directions. A tour of the provinces, to Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, Rheims, Marseilles, and Lyon took place during this period. A certain playful tendency, as in his early studies with Czerny, even now showed itself occasionally. In Bordeaux, for example, he played a sonata of his own before a famous violin virtuoso and passed it off as one of Beethoven’s, managing thereby to arouse utter admiration. What has passed from French biographies into German, concerning a difficulty that is supposed to have happened to him there—which is why he would not speak about his stay there—is pure fiction, or appears to rest entirely upon errors.32
During this period Liszt was also diligently composing, not only for his instrument. In addition, he made a name for himself with a small-scale opera, Don Sanche, ou Le Château d’amour on a text that the prolific Theaulon had provided him. He speaks highly and with gratitude of Paer for his friendly help and advice in this youthful undertaking, which was received with encouraging applause, running through four or five performances at the theater of the Académie royale.
Around this time, Liszt suffered an inner crisis. Adrift in youthful turmoil, not satisfied with musical success alone, without a safe outlet for, or the means to appease or resolve the urgent feelings driving him, he sought them—an error that often occurs—not deep within himself, but in external things redeemed only by their high-mindedness. He thus lapsed into fervid religiosity. Understandably, his sensible father opposed this tendency, which the son, as a consequence, concealed as carefully as possible within his inner life. Only in the evening, when he went to bed, did he give full play to the urgings of his heart, stole out of bed, and poured out his young soul for hours in the most fervent prayers. Anyone who is able to comprehend psychic struggles will be able to recognize in such lapses the noble and profound character of the soul that has submitted to them. He sought consolation in the sustained reading of works which, nevertheless, strengthened his mawkish inclinations. Les Pères du désert was now his favorite book, indeed nearly the only one with which he occupied himself.33 Music was close to repugnant to him; he pursued it only in order to satisfy his father. The tours of the French provinces already referred to, and later on a trip to Switzerland, followed by a third trip to England, appear to have been the means by which his father attempted to struggle against his son’s inclinations, which were gradually taking root in him. The last tour was a continuous series of triumphs of his brilliant virtuosity, which he achieved particularly at the Drury Lane Theater. Nonetheless, not only these psychic conflicts, but the acute nervous stimulation inseparable from music had upset his physical health. In order to restore it, his father went to Boulogne with him. Only here, where his son regained his health, did his father meet his death, on Saint Augustus Day, 1827.34
Liszt felt this painful blow with all the fervor of a youthful heart, for in spite of his father’s strictness, he had nevertheless respected and loved that part of him that never deviated from the most noble principles, that held fast to an ambition directed toward higher ideals. In his youthful innocence, he felt the need then and there to urge his mother, who was still living in Hungary, to settle in Paris, where she has since made her home and where she lives with her son on the closest terms. And yet in the natural order of things, one tends to feel the freedom and independence that accompany one’s growing maturity as something beneficial. And so it was with Liszt. Unreservedly self-motivated intellectually, he entered upon a new phase of his life.
The immediate steps along this path were not without the most bitter struggles. He had won the love of a brilliant young girl, who possessed both position and wealth.35 Even in France those prejudices, or shall we say those superficial, base views about life, appeared not to have been completely uprooted by the storms of revolutions, which strive to exert their material might over the highest intellectual nobility. The girl’s father was opposed to the union. Liszt gave in with a pride more noble than the pride of birth. But the pain he suffered acted with destructive force on his passionately fervent heart. He was forced to undergo a harsh psychological struggle that suddenly took him away once again from the most varied artistic activity that had taken possession of him with the most passionate force—he was practicing, composing, teaching—and led him to those mystically gloomy regions that had once before enveloped him. This second critical period, gradually gaining strength, was much more violent than the first. He buried himself in reclusive reflection and study, threw aside his art, stripping it of all worldly connection, shut himself up with his books, avoided all human contact. He saw his mother for months on end only at mealtime, facing her at the table completely silent.
Prayer was the only consolation his heart would allow. At the same time, an inquiring impulse drove him to seek out truth, to struggle free of these circumstances. He read an immense amount and also attempted to gain, through his reading of philosophical texts, clarity about the doubts that tormented him. Beside the usual old favorites he read during difficult times, he chose works that formed a contrast with them—Voltaire, Rousseau, Schelling. And in point of fact it was finally his intellectual strength that brought him back on the right path. Perhaps his physical crisis also hastened the crisis his soul was undergoing. Having allowed his dreams, his notions, and his hopes to lead him astray for so long, he not only returned to the firm foundation of truth, to the sunny kingdom of art and of life, but took hold of it with his whole being. But what is expressed in this connection in several biographies about him, that he threw himself into a frenzy and whirlpool of worldly pleasures, is an interpretation of his altered direction both untrue and unworthy, an interpretation he simply yet decisively rejects. His intellectual powers healed and sustained him now continuously. He felt the need to look inward for his aspirations. As an adult, both physically and mentally, he now felt he was no longer in the condition in which he first entered public life as a child. He felt it as his obligation, imposed on him by virtue of the brilliant, truly miraculous successes of his youth, to live up to his artistic promise through his achievements. “More mature and stronger, I didn’t want to content myself with less than was the case when I was a child.” “I had been,” he joked, “the petit prodige. Now I felt a calling, an obligation to myself to become the grand prodige!”
All his efforts were directed toward this one aim. He practiced, if now with more abandon, yet with tremendous persistence. He composed a great deal, trying out all manner of fashions depending on his intellectual mood of the moment. He supported himself by giving lessons, for which he had the most extraordinary talent and much more aptitude than one would assume from his artistic temperament.36 Altogether his scientific knowledge of the piano is one that has been acquired with the greatest sense of purpose, and in this connection he has taken notice of everything of importance that has taken place in the world of music.
In his mood of exceptional vitality and passionate inclination, every intellectual happening must have seized him with the most singular impact. One such example is the July Revolution, which fell within this period of his life and filled him with the most passionate enthusiasm. By the same token, he had created other hopes for himself from its consequences, and in this connection allied himself completely with the youth of France. He even abandoned the artistic intentions he had conceived in the first enthusiasm for this historical event. He wanted to write a Sinfonie révolutionnaire whose themes he had put together from a Hussite song, a Protestant chorale, and “the Marseillaise.” On the whole what he wanted to express in it was more the idea of a Reformation that reconciles, and thus to make the historical moment symbolically comprehensible in religious terms. The political turn that the events took led him away, however, from his purpose.
Saint-Simonism, in full bloom at the time, also took hold of him with gripping force. But it was more its fundamental ideas than the later degenerate forms that attracted him. Its governing idea, which paid due course to both heart and mind, is to construct human society solely on a peaceable (or friedseligen, as Liszt has expressed it) foundation and to acknowledge only three essential distinctions—a kind of intellectual or spiritual Trinity—in the activity devoted to the preservation of the whole—the scientific, the artistic, and the industrial—and, to the contrary, to abolish all external barriers and differences. Such was the foundation of the system that won his warm sympathy. Later, when its principles came to be violated, when strange, untenable forms developed from a falsely understood application of these principles, he lost no time in detaching himself from them.
This period of his life lasted until 1833. Because of a personal event, the following year was of decisive significance for the artist. He entered, although under conflicting circumstances, an affair of the heart. The details are not meant for the general public.37 As a consequence of this relationship it happened that he left Paris for a rather long time, going first to Switzerland, then Italy. This period was exceptionally productive for him artistically, with a series of independent compositions that he has not yet published, nor even yet arranged and written down as a unit. He has nevertheless gathered part of them together in a large work of several volumes, to which, as already mentioned, he has given the title Années de pèlerinage. It is above all from what he sends out into the world of this collection that his importance as a composer will be judged. The two samples that he offered in his concert (cf. p. 22)38 promise something extraordinarily beautiful.
As far as events are concerned, the artist’s life from this period on has become almost entirely a public one. The exceptional stage he has reached as an artist affords him everywhere the same successes he has achieved before our eyes. Paris, Italy, England, but above all Hungary, his homeland, and our German homeland have all witnessed them enthusiastically. The most brilliant, indeed truly uplifting successes have been those in Hungary. To the enthusiasm that the artist aroused was added the Hungarians’ pride in their famous countryman and their gratitude for the huge charitable donations he made as a result of the concerts he presented in the imperial city of Vienna, to which he had hastened from Italy after the unprecedented disaster of the Danube floods. In the context of this union of three powerful elements of enthusiasm and respect, he was named an honorary citizen of two Hungarian cities and, in the Theater in Pest, with the acclamation of the crowd, a sword of honor was presented to him by the greatest nobility of the land with the entreaty that by accepting it he would agree to preserve above all his Hungarian nationality. For the sword, in Hungary, is the national symbol of the rights of free male citizens (freien Männerrechts).*
In a similarly brilliant, genuinely royal manner Liszt was acclaimed in the Rhineland, where he won for himself a second home, a kind of citizenship of the heart and mind, through his concerts for the Beethoven monument and the completion of the Cologne cathedral and by a leisurely tour of the towns along the Rhine, including a visit to the island of Nonnenwörth. On 22 August 1841 he enjoyed an unusual and brilliant triumph there, when the Choral Society of Cologne, fetching him from the island in a magnificent steamboat adorned with flags of every description and discharging mortar fire, afforded him a journey filled with song and pleasure such as never before have sparkled on the waves of the Rhine.
What happened here in our home city—the way the enthusiasm for his extraordinary appearance turned out to be something truly popular—we have already described in our reports about those events, at least as far as the facts are concerned, in the most cursory way.
What remains for us to accomplish is to take another look at the unique character of his artistic and intellectual career and to see how it has turned out. Inasmuch as we have already attempted to describe and explain it abundantly, we want now to confine ourselves more to matters of fact. We think it would be interesting in that connection to go back to a childhood anecdote that the artist himself has confirmed to us and given a more detailed account.
The phrenology of Franz Gall has found its many opponents, yet it has been confirmed on occasion in remarkable ways. Liszt himself, when he was fifteen, was presented the occasion for a Gallean examination. He was taken to London, to the famous phrenologist Deville, to whom he was introduced as a boy who would not amount to anything, who showed no ability at all. The scholar was asked if he might detect, by examining his skull, any tendency that might promise some hope for his development. Deville touched the boy’s head and said, then and there, strongly affected, “Have you given him a chance with music? That would certainly be my advice.” One can easily imagine the happy impression this judgment made on everyone present.
Perhaps Deville, with more investigations, might have been able to make further claims of the greatest importance, for though Liszt’s other intellectual gifts have not turned decisively into achievements, they belong nonetheless, in themselves and in degree, to the most extraordinary. They have led him along the wondrous path on which we have accompanied him. But will the brilliance of this rarest of individuals leave behind a permanent impact as well? Is there bound up with the brilliant light a deeper fire, an inner, enduring, fertile warmth? Let us for the present leave this question unresolved and consider where he stands now.
Liszt stands on the summit of virtuosity. He has intellectualized its mechanical life to a degree as no one before him. The appearance of Paganini, which affected him to an indescribable degree, had a significant impact on him in this regard. In a dignified and deeply considered article in the Revue musicale, “Paganini à propos de sa mort,” an article of decisive importance for shedding light on Liszt’s intellectual and artistic efforts, he has spoken out with absolute clarity on his views about this artist and the manner in which one can become the heir to his fame. We quote the following passage from it.*
I do not hesitate to say: a figure like Paganini can never appear again…but there are other ways in which it is possible to achieve a comparable renown and a higher authority.
To regard art not as a certain means to achieve selfish advantage or a sterile fame, but as a congenial force, one that brings people together and unites them; to elevate one’s life to that high rank whose ideal is talent; to make artists aware of what they can and must be; to prevail over public opinion through the superior force of a noble way of life—this is the task to which an artist must be devoted who feels strong enough to lay claim to a share of the inheritance of Paganini.
Although difficult, the task is not absolutely impossible. Today, the path to success remains broad for all those who strive for prestige. Everyone who dedicates his art to a principle or a conviction may consider himself assured of a sympathetic reception. Everyone anticipates a new organization of the political conditions of society. Without overstating the significance of the artist in the transformation of society, without proclaiming in grandiose expressions, as one has so often done, his mission and his apostolate, we believe that his position is allotted him by the design of Providence, and that he too is called upon, for his part, to collaborate in the creation of a stable and ethical universe.
From this moment on, may the future artist, with his whole heart, renounce every egotistical and vain role, of which, we believe, Paganini was a last and famous example. May he set his purpose not in himself but beyond himself; may virtuosity be for him a means, not an ultimate goal; may he call to mind that nobility obliges, as an old proverb expresses it, just as we are able to say today with as much, nay more, justification, genius obliges.
We may well take this as a statement of the solemn promise according to which Liszt has set out upon his career. Who would be able to claim for him a more worthy conception of it, inasmuch as it is associated with decency in both thought and action?
Whether it is, after all, the noblest career, insofar as art is concerned, to which he can lay claim, or whether there was for him a calling to a higher path and the strength to achieve it is another question. As we have already stated many times, it seems to us that the enormous process of maturing with regard to Liszt’s inner life has not yet been brought to a close, for the nature of such an intellect does not mature as tranquilly or quickly as do those of a lesser order. He still struggles on the stormy sea of passion; he is a torrent bursting forth that is still searching for its proper channel. The things that he values and loves the most are more revealing to us than what he personally gives us, which is capable of the most varied interpretations.
We do not want to mention here those eternal geniuses placed at the very summit of art by universal acknowledgment, although it is always a significant sign that Liszt appears to assign Beethoven the highest place among them. Let us rather turn to those with whom he has lived, struggled, and developed. As far as keyboard virtuosity is concerned, he reveres Chopin, respects Moscheles, gives all the others their due, although he has a profound aversion against mechanical perfection without intellectual acuteness. How he especially loves Schubert as a composer we have seen. As for the French, Berlioz is the one for whom he feels the closest kinship. The lighter, newer French music of Auber, Adam, Halévy has little effect on him. He feels that comic opera has closed its account with Boieldieu. It is understandable, then, when the artist says that his mind is drawn irresistibly toward or away from paintings, scholarly literature (especially religious-philosophical literature), or poetry in similar ways. He is conversant with French belles-lettres in an unusually comprehensive way. The more recent works of Romanticism, especially Victor Hugo, have inspired him profoundly. He knows German literature less well, only a few things of Lessing, Goethe’s Faust, and some recent works, which have attracted attention in our circle, too. Rather than instructing him in what is true and authentic in German learning, however, they give him false notions about us. He feels the strongest kinship with Lord Byron. He is the poet, as Liszt himself admits, whom he has embraced, to whom he has abandoned himself completely. The choice is decisive as far as his intellectual development is concerned. It more than anything else shows the hope to be justified, if we may thus express it, that the very same intellectual development still has to await a new phase, perhaps a final affirming and ennobling transformation. Were any remote or unfamiliar intellectual and poetic force suited to negotiate the passage from these passionate conditions into those of higher enlightenment and discretion, it would be, in our opinion, that of Jean Paul, whose ethical authority and titanic powers of fantasy were able to awaken, in ways that we cannot admire enough, the highest faith and the truest and noblest convictions.
Still, in the most unadulterated and surest way, powerfully maturing forces become reconciled of their own accord.
In the noble and worthy tasks that the artist has set himself, may he add these last, the noblest and most worthy. In their perfect and harmonious fusion, all moral and artistic elements collapse into one point, which lies, to be sure, in the unconquered realm of the ideal! It is not our right but his alone to decide how closely he makes contact with the full extent of his being and his powers. No one has the power fully to achieve, but each has the power to strive; few, however, have the decisive courage. Still, the eagle flies toward the sun!
1. I have not attempted to correct every factual error in Rellstab’s biography, which I think would be both tedious and unnecessary. At least some of the errors belong to the long uncritically anecdotal history of Liszt biography—for example, the legend that Adam Liszt was on friendly terms with Joseph Haydn—and these will eventually be eliminated as Liszt biography achieves a more critical attitude toward such anecdotal material.
2. See, for example, Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge, Eng.: 2004), whose use of contemporary documents, including the early biographies of Liszt, has considerably enriched our understanding of the virtuoso Liszt within the social and political context of the 1840s.
3. Liszt’s De la situation appeared in six installments, 3 May, 10 May, 17 May, 26 July, 30 August, 11 October, in the second volume (1835) of the Gazette musicale; the sixth installment is included in the present collection, see pp. 291–302.
4. Liszt’s reception of this nationalist Hungarian sabre precipitated a public relations crisis both in the Danube region and beyond, as explored in depth in Dana Gooley’s The Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 129–55.
5. La Mara, ed., Letters of Franz Liszt, trans. Constance Bache, 2 vols. (London: 1894), vol. 1, p. 42.
6. Ibid., p. 47.
7. See Carl Engel, “Views and Reviews,” Musical Quarterly 22 (1936): 354–61, for a short biography of Christern and a partial list of corrections and comments Liszt made in a copy of Christern’s biography, acquired by the Library of Congress in 1924.
8. The more lasting interest shown in Christern’s biography comes from the handwritten corrections that Liszt made in the published text, presumably for a second edition, one that never materialized. The corrections are interesting as far as they go, but each one has to be evaluated on its own terms. Alan Walker, for example, goes too far when he reads these corrections as evidence of the “remarkable objectivity with which [Liszt] viewed himself as a biographical topic” in Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years 1811–1847 (New York: 1983), p. 4. For all the valuable factual corrections Liszt makes, he perpetuates errors, some unknowingly, to be sure. As for his attempts to “remove exaggeration,” Liszt is selective, removing some and leaving others, particularly those overwritten tributes to his strong German nationalist sentiments, which clearly could only have pleased him.
9. See Engel, “Views and Reviews,” p. 357.
10. Serge Gut and Jacqueline Bellas, eds., Correspondance Franz Liszt, Marie d’Agoult (Paris: 2001), p. 871.
11. Ludwig Rellstab, Franz Liszt: Beurtheilungen-Berichte-Lebensskizze (Berlin: 1842), p. 2.
12. Ibid., p. 7.
13. August Kahlert’s “Das Concertwesen der Gegenwart” appeared in Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik 16 (1842). Kahlert (1807–64) wrote prolifically on the philosophy and aesthetics of music and its history, forming a close friendship with Schumann as well as with poets and philosophers of the period. He was a regular contributor to the NZfM as well as other German periodicals. See also Axel Schröter, “Der Name Beethoven ist heilig in der Kunst”: Studien zu Liszts Beethoven-Rezeption, vol. 1 (Sinzig: 1999), p. 167ff.
14. See Schröter, “Der Name Beethoven,” p. 168.
15. Rellstab, Franz Liszt, p. 7.
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid., p. 52.
18. Apparently on comfortable enough terms with Liszt, Rellstab was willing to accede, for example, to the request of students to intercede with Liszt about reducing ticket prices for them. See Rellstab (1842), pp. 28–29.
19. On Rellstab’s early years, see Jürgen Rehm, Zur Musikrezeption im vormärzlichen Berlin: Die Präsentation bürgerlichen Selbstverständnisses und biedermeierlicher Kunstanschauung in den Musikkritiken Ludwig Rellstabs (Hildesheim: 1983), p. 50ff.
20. The whole of Rellstab’s book was reprinted in Liszt Saeculum, in seven installments between 1978 and 1984.
21. In the preface, Rellstab merely says that “complying with a different wish” he has added a biographical sketch to his collection of articles. He goes on to explain that his sketch is merely a preparation for a much larger work—this too is hinted at in the opening paragraph of the biography—and that the value of his work so far comes, in part, from the personal communications with Liszt. It would be surprising, then, if the “different wish” was not that of Liszt himself.
22. The letter to Marie, written 15 February, goes on to say: “I am being asked for it from all sides. It is a terribly important thing to me.” Gut, Correspondance, p. 885. Once again, on 11 April, Liszt brings up the matter of a biography with Marie: “I won’t press you for a biography, but you cannot imagine how annoyed I am with this pile of biographical notices that are swarming all over German papers. You will do me an important service in putting all of this in order” (p. 901). At this point, as he tells Marie, he intends to have the intended biography signed by Belloni, who was Liszt’s secretary at the time.
23. By this time, both the Schober and Rellstab accounts had appeared, both in March. Liszt was pleased enough to consider using them in some way as part of the intended biography in French. This is what he explained to Marie, in a letter of 29 November 1842. By that point he realized that merely to translate both as part of a projected biography would make too long a work so that, as he tells Marie, “it will be necessary for you to make the necessary abbreviations.” Gut, Correspondance, p. 941. For her part, Marie had already suggested Pascallet as a possible publisher. Once again, the following day (November 30), Liszt wrote to Marie about the intended biography. Liszt had already written to Rellstab to supply documents and had already gone over a manuscript that is far too long: “you must be so good as to give another two weeks of your attention to this annoying task” (p. 953). Unfortunately, what to do about Schober and Rellstab had not been settled: “One will have to see,” Liszt tells Marie, “in what proportion one will have to intermingle Schober and Rellstab with the Pascallet Biography.”
24. The Duverger biography written and assembled by Marie d’Agoult is a compilation of sorts. Marie follows the narrative order of Rellstab’s sketch for the most part, expanding and elaborating when she saw fit. As for Schober, a translation of one of the articles in his book is incorporated as one of the appendices, along with Liszt’s essay on Paganini. In addition, she had before her original documents, one of them perhaps the childhood diary of Liszt, which has been published as Franz Liszt Tagebuch 1827, ed. Detlef Altenburg and Rainer Kleinertz (Vienna, 1986).
25. C.F.B., Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 11 May 1842; see also Rehm, Zur Musikrezeption im vormärzlichen Berlin, pp. 103ff.
26. Gooley (The Virtuoso Liszt, pp. 181ff., for example) has argued that Rellstab came to dislike Liszt’s Beethoven interpretations more and more, which I think is overstated. I do not see much evidence that Rellstab changed his views significantly about Liszt’s approach to Beethoven during the course of a mere two months, when Liszt was performing in Berlin. His reviews and articles show that he reacted to individual performances of Beethoven as he heard them. Some he disliked—for example, Liszt’s performance of the “Moonlight” Sonata (pp. 6–7); others he thought extraordinary—for example, the “Appassionata” (pp. 21–22), except for the rushed tempo of the last section of the last movement, or the Third Piano Concerto (p. 27), about which he had no reservations whatsoever. Mostly his dislikes centered around exaggerations of tempo.
One can learn a great deal about Rellstab’s ideas about Beethoven interpretation from a passage in his Ludwig Berger, ein Denkmal (Berlin: 1846), pp. 75ff. As he relates therein, he spent an evening in the company of Ferdinand Ries, Bernhard Klein, and Ludwig Berger, who began to discuss how Beethoven’s sonatas should be performed. Each of the three then demonstrated his views to Rellstab, choosing the first movement of the “Pathétique” Sonata. Rellstab found Berger’s performance the most inspired, the closest to what was demanded by the music. In discussing Berger’s performance, he emphasized the grand rhetorical sweep and the varied poetic imagery called to mind by the performance, characteristics which he found again and again in Liszt’s performances of Beethoven. Indeed, his whole description of Berger’s interpretation would be more than appropriate for what he found worthy of praise in Liszt’s playing of Beethoven, except, of course, when Liszt, for whatever reason, chose to emphasize contrasts too drastically, or tampered in some way with the overall unity of shape or form.
27. Rellstab, Ludwig Berger, p. 81.
28. The concert in Oedenburg took place in October 1820, at the Old Casino. Liszt appeared as a guest in a concert by the blind flautist Baron von Braun. That Liszt, who had turned nine just four days earlier, was attacked by fever before the concert is one of a number of childhood events or anecdotes initiated by d’Ortigue, who wrote, “La fièvre l’avait repris avant de se mettre au piano et cette exécution l’augmenta.” (He was overtaken by fever again before sitting down to the piano and his playing increased it) (see p. 312 in this volume). Although Liszt apparently suffered bouts of fever as a child, there is no evidence that he suffered such an attack before his appearance in Oedenburg. The anecdote retains its effectiveness because it dramatizes the success that Liszt is supposed to have achieved at one of his very first appearances as a child. So biographers continue to include it. Ramann goes further than most in dramatizing the obstacles that Liszt had to overcome, and the anxiety Adam Liszt suffered from the whole affair; see Franz Liszt. Artist and Man 1811–1840, tran. E. Cowdery (London: 1882), pp. 39–40. Walker adds to Liszt’s success still more by mistranslating d’Ortigue: not “his playing increased it” but incorrectly, “yet he was strengthened by the playing” (Virtuoso Years, p. 68).
It is interesting that Liszt has no recollection of illness, but he could very well have forgotten. More to the point is Rellstab’s description; he argues, with characteristic good sense, that too much has been made of such incidents. More relevant still is the issue of biographical method that this anecdote raises. We are not dealing with a single anecdote of childhood fever. Many others occur. What is fascinating is how virtually all are described as occurring concurrently with some act of creative expression—along with the first discovery of talent, for example, accompanying Liszt’s first lessons, at public performances, and so on. This linking of fever, metaphorically connected to fire, in the context of the rise and expression of talent, that is, of the origins of creativity, has a long history as a biographical motif, to use an expression of Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz (see their Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist: A Historical Experiment [New Haven: 1979], esp. pp. 86ff.). The purpose of such a motif is to provide some form of explanation, however fanciful, even magical, for the mystery of talent and creativity: talent arises by a harnessing of power and an expenditure of energy after a long internal struggle. In the case of Liszt, as in most cases when biographical motives are fashioned, there is some truth to the realistic basis on which these anecdotes are constructed—Liszt suffered from fevers as a child. As far as the concert in Oedenburg that Rellstab refers to is concerned, however, nothing concrete is known; the invention is necessitated by the desperation to explain the unknown.
29. Conventionsmünze, or assimilated coinage, the silver florins reintroduced in 1818, with a ratio of 1:2.5 to the older currency, or Viennese currency.
30. The famous concert at which Beethoven is said to have been present is not, as Rellstab mentions in the following paragraph, the concert in Town Hall, but rather the second concert, in the small Redoutensaal (13 April 1823). Rellstab’s account differs in interesting ways from previous ones. His is the first to separate the concert from a visit to Beethoven’s house the week before, and the first to mention, although indirectly, the so-called Weihekuss (kiss of consecration). Rellstab discussed these events, as the reader will see from his account, with Liszt himself, and this alone invites discussion. What intrigued Rellstab is the account of the events he read in Anton Schindler’s Beethoven in Paris (Münster: 1842). Schindler had written that Liszt and his father were received in an unfriendly manner by Beethoven during their visit to the composer’s house. Rellstab could not have known that the two entries in Beethoven’s Conversation Books that mentioned such a reception were added by Schindler after Beethoven’s death. Nevertheless, the fact of an unfriendly reception seems to have circulated to some extent, because d’Ortigue mentions just such a reception (although he places it at the concert and not in Beethoven’s house) in his biography. One should not make too much of Liszt’s response to Rellstab—that he remembers no show of unfriendliness on the part of Beethoven—because one cannot verify that an unfriendly reception ever took place, although the Conversation Books make clear that Liszt and his father, along with Schindler, visited Beethoven a week before the concert.
It was no doubt Schindler’s idea that Beethoven attend the concert of the young prodigy and provide him with a theme on which to improvise. The whole venture was foolhardy and Schindler, who was particularly close to the composer during the course of 1823, knew it better than most. Beethoven’s deafness had kept him away from public concerts, he disliked prodigies, and, at the moment, was full of anxious concern over the publication and performance of his Missa Solemnis. To ask the composer under such circumstances to provide a theme for a prodigy with whom he was barely acquainted was an impertinence that would have offended anyone close to the composer. Schindler knew all this, yet his inflated view of his relationship with Beethoven, and the need to shore up his sense of importance by impressing people with what he alone could accomplish because he had Beethoven’s ear led him into rash situations from which he could extricate himself only with great difficulty. Given these circumstances, it is not unlikely that Adam Liszt and his son were not received in the friendliest manner, but that is all one can say.
Adam Liszt believed, unfortunately, that Schindler could accomplish the impossible. Indeed, he surely had Beethoven’s presence in mind when he indicated in the program for the concert that audiences could expect a “free fantasy on the pianoforte by the concert-giver, on a written-out theme most humbly requested from Someone in the audience.” See Emmerich Karl Horvath, Franz Liszt, vol. 1, Kindheit (Eisenstadt: 1978), p. 80, where the program is given in its entirety.
In spite of the symbolic importance that Liszt biographers would begin to attribute to the concert of 13 April 1823, contemporary events suggest that the whole affair was little more than a fool’s errand on the part of Adam Liszt and Schindler. For one thing, Beethoven did not attend, a fact clear enough in the Conversation Books. In the following weeks, along with the usual playful mockery of Schindler, Beethoven is treated to a report of the concert by his nephew Karl, whose knowledge is clearly secondhand, and Johann, his brother, who seems to have attended the concert. Franz’s playing was also a disappointment, for although the reviewers praise his skill and fluency, he appears not to have mustered sufficient strength for the technical demands required of both a concerto by Hummel, and a grand set of variations by Moscheles. Ironically, the greatest disappointment of the afternoon was Franz’s improvisation. Performers were always courting disaster with promised improvisations because they were at the mercy of whatever challenge they accepted from the audience. Could it be that Adam Liszt’s grandiose promise rankled teachers and their students in Vienna, encouraging prospective rivals to prepare difficult or inappropriate themes for Franz, who was, after all, a relative newcomer. This actually seems to be what happened. One of those in the audience who had prepared a theme was Johann Pixis, a well-known composer and teacher in Vienna who had prepared a theme from a Haydn quartet. As it turned out, one of Pixis’s students, who had positioned himself unbeknownst to his teacher close to Franz, handed him a rondo theme that because of its excessive length—it was twenty-four measures long—was utterly inappropriate as a theme on which to improvise. No wonder that reviewers faulted him in his improvisation. The actual details of the concert can be found in a little-known review in Der Sammler (29 April 1823), which Michael Saffle has brought to our attention, in “Liszt Research Since 1936: A Bibliographic Survey,” Acta musicologica 58 (1986): 231–81; the text of the review is given on p. 279. See also my “Liszt and Beethoven: The Creation of a Personal Myth,” 19th-Century Music 12, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 116–31, where a case is made, on the basis of the Conversation Books, that it is utterly unlikely that a second visit on the part of Liszt and his father to Beethoven’s house took place sometime after the concert, and therefore utterly unlikely that the scene of the Weihekuss took place there, either.
Such disappointment and embarrassment, in this case for Franz and his father, is often the natural breeding ground for denial and idealization. Exactly when the two began to reconstruct the events in such a way as to psychically transform them into what they had so deeply wished to happen is difficult to say. It may have begun as a conscious exaggeration, indeed, falsification on the part of Adam Liszt, as part of an attempt to impress people with his son’s successes. As Bernard Gavoty has related, Adam Liszt told Cherubini, when he and his son spoke to the director of the Paris Conservatory about the possibility of his son’s entrance, that “Beethoven heard him and kissed him in front of the entire hall,” presumably part of a conversation with Cherubini that is described in an unpublished letter of Liszt to his friend Janka Wohl (see Gavoty, Liszt: Le virtuose 1811–1848 [Paris: 1980], p. 66ff.). Whatever one thinks of the veracity of such evidence, it is possible that something along these lines happened spontaneously, becoming the starting point for psychic elaboration.
One of the most interesting and too little unexplored aspects of Beethoven worship in the nineteenth century is what we might call the pilgrimage literature, those accounts, both imagined and real, in which common motives are elaborated in a Proppian-like process, motives that generally circle around the expression of a holy pilgrimage, generally involving a first encounter with Beethoven, during which great emotional turmoil is experienced by the visitor as Beethoven is gradually humanized so as to arouse the deepest pathos. The climax of most versions is the sought-after sign of recognition and approval, often a paternal blessing of some sort. Czerny has left one such account (“Erinnerungen aus meinen Leben,” English trans., Musical Quarterly 42 [1956]: 306ff.); so has Rellstab himself, in the second volume of his Aus meinem Leben (Berlin: 1861), pp. 224ff. The most famous fictional account is Wagner’s A Pilgrimage to Beethoven, written in 1840, in which a young artist, the author-narrator, is first turned away by the housekeeper but finally admitted. These pilgrimage stories circulated much as in oral history, with details shared, omitted, and altered, the whole process creating a kind of fetishistic attachment to the person and memory of Beethoven. Liszt’s elaboration, with its roots in actual fact, becomes ultimately a fantasy of artistic genealogy that acquired the deepest significance in Liszt’s psychic life.
31. The two concerts described by Rellstab took place 1 December 1822, where Liszt played the A Minor Concerto, and 13 April 1823, where he played the B Minor Concerto. Liszt made several other public appearances, as well as appearances in private homes, in Vienna during the years 1822–23. Among recent biographers, only Emmerich Karl Horvath has given a full account of these appearances; see Franz Liszt: Kindheit, p. 75ff.
32. The difficulty of which Rellstab speaks remains unclear. One assumes that he is referring to the biography of d’Ortigue and the Universal-Lexicon der Tonkunst. In this we learn that in Liszt’s tour of the French provinces in 1826, Bordeaux is where he passed off one of his own sonatas as one by Beethoven, but there is no biographical mention of any difficulty Liszt might have suffered in that city. Of other cities Liszt visited during the tour, it is Lyons where he is said to have experienced a new awareness and sense of determination about his career and as a result returned to Paris in order to study counterpoint with Reicha. If the implication of cause and effect has any merit, then it may be that Liszt came to the realization in Lyons that he still required further training in order to fulfill his destiny. By the time of Ramann and later biographers—Ramann is vague about place—but during Liszt’s tour of the provinces he began to suffer from the mental crisis that affected him during the year or two before his father’s death (1827), a time when he presumably turned away from music to the priesthood, a complete about-face as far as Liszt’s mental state is concerned. From these facts alone, it is clear that the whole psychological character of Liszt’s adolescent years has still to be dealt with properly. See d’Ortigue’s “Biographical Study of Franz Liszt” in this volume; Gustav Schilling, Encyclopädie der gesammten musikalischen Wissenschaften, oder Universal-Lexikon der Tonkunst (Stuttgart: 1837), vol. 4, p. 416; Ramann, Franz Liszt: Artist and Man, p. 122ff.
33. It is hard to tell whether Les Pères du désert is the title of a particular text or, more likely, refers to a popular genre of texts containing the lives of the desert fathers and a digest of their writings. One such possibility would be Principales Vies des pères des déserts d’Orient… : avec un précis de leur doctrine spirituelle et de leur discipline monastique, published in Avignon in 1825.
34. One cannot blame Liszt’s biographers for assuming that Liszt passed through a period of adolescent struggle and rebellion. That he was a prodigy, guided by a father who was relentlessly dedicated to his son’s career, at least partly out of a need to compensate for his own failed career as a musician, would suggest to anyone with common sense that Liszt’s adolescent years were psychologically difficult for him. Rellstab’s analysis of Liszt’s adolescent years is far more temperate and cautious, and therefore more believable, than those of contemporary biographers. He holds to the tradition, initiated by d’Ortigue, that Liszt would lapse or withdraw into some form of melancholy and morbid religiosity when in the throws of psychic struggle, although he rejects, with Liszt’s help, the idea that this behavior was already present when Liszt was six or seven years old. There is certainly evidence for such behavior, on the other hand, in the years before and after the death of Liszt’s father.
Rellstab may be off the track, however, when he argues that Adam Liszt opposed these morbid religious tendencies in his son. If it is true that Liszt grew dissatisfied and restless when it came to music, especially with the demands and expectations his father placed on him, it is more likely that it was Adam Liszt who would seek to gain his son’s compliance and find some way to oppose his growing willfulness by encouraging him, perhaps even demanding that he dedicate himself through religious devotion to the virtues of paternal obedience and respect. This is at least one way to view the contents of Liszt’s recently published childhood diary (Franz Liszt Tagebuch 1827). Liszt kept this small diary for a brief period during his sixteenth year, from 1 April (incidentally, only a few days after Beethoven’s death) through 21 July, a month before the death of Adam Liszt. It is made up entirely of popular pietistic religious texts, those that Adam Liszt would no doubt have known and perhaps used during his studies in the Franciscan order in Malacka. A frequently cited text in the diary, L’Imitation de Jésus-Christ, would have been required reading for Adam at Malacka. Nearly all the entries entered into the diary by the sixteen-year-old Franz, each dutifully introduced with the sign of the cross and the sequence of numbers from one to seven, portray a severe and demanding God requiring hard work and obedience. It is not hard to see Adam Liszt as the driving force behind the diary.
35. The young girl was Liszt’s biographically enshrined first love, Caroline de Saint-Cricq, the seventeen-year-old daughter of Count Pierre de Saint-Cricq, who was minister of commerce under Charles X. Liszt may have come to know the family as a member of the parish of the Church of Saint-Vincent-de-Paul, where he was confirmed in 1829, as there were Saint-Cricqs in the parish. The period of their relationship extends from around the latter part of 1827 into the fall of 1828. See Henri Doisy, Les Débuts d’une grande paroisse: Saint-Vincent-de-Paul Montholor (Roven: 1942), pp. 286ff.
36. Rellstab shows himself here, as he often does in his biography, to be psychologically perceptive about Liszt. Most biographers are content to describe and enumerate Liszt’s many activities that center around pedagogy, which, it should be emphasized, include not only his teaching but his interest in original sources and autographs, critical editions, and so on. But Rellstab seems to sense that teaching fulfilled significant needs for Liszt, needs that are already present in his adolescent years. Perhaps Liszt’s interest began in simple emulation of Czerny, who was more competent and benevolent than his father in the role of teacher. This is the impression one gets from a letter he wrote to a Parisian lady, in 1824, in which he suggests how she might go about improving a score she had given him. (The letter is published in Mária Eckhardt, “Liszt in his Formative Years—Unpublished Letters 1824–1827,” New Hungarian Quarterly 27, no. 103 [1986]: 93–107). Ultimately, the explanation for Liszt’s lifelong dedication to teaching, perhaps even dependence on it, goes well beyond the generosity of spirit that Eckhardt and other writers propose. Indeed, it touches on complicated ego issues of self-worth and status that have yet to be examined.
37. Rellstab refers here, with tact and discretion, to Liszt’s relationship with Marie d’Agoult. The two met late in 1832 or early 1833. Near the end of May 1835, both left Paris, separately, meeting in Basel to begin a union that lasted more than a decade. By the time of Rellstab’s biography, they had had three children together. In October of 1839, their relationship had begun to slowly disintegrate, running its course with considerable anguish and recrimination until April 1844, when the two parted.
38. Rellstab is referring here to his article “Zusammenfassung der folgenden Concerte,” one of the essays published together with his sketch of Liszt’s life. The samples he refers to, Au lac de Wallenstadt and Au bord d’une source, were performed at the concert of 2 February 1842.
39. Rellstab refers here to Franz von Schober’s Briefe über F. Liszt’s Aufenthalt in Ungarn (Berlin, 1843).
40. Liszt’s article on Paganini, “Sur la mort de Paganini,” was published in the Revue et Gazette musicale, 23 August 1840, and included as an appendix to J. Duverger, Notice biographique sur Franz Liszt (Paris, 2nd ed., May 1843).
When, in looking through biographies with Liszt, I came to this place, he exclaimed in quite a lively manner: “Child’s play? Not at all. It was very difficult for me and I hesitated and often went wrong. I can do it, of course, but it is even now a difficult task for me.” He wanted to give it a try on the spot, but in so doing he really got tangled up. It seems to us no inconsiderable feature of the artist’s natural candor that he is ready to disclaim exaggerated rumors about himself and to give to the biographer a more modest version.
Soon to appear are letters which a friend of Liszt’s is bringing out about his Hungarian sojourn that will give us a more detailed description of these events.39
From the translation that appeared in no. 25 of the Magazin für die Lit. des Auslandes (1842).40