Viewing Franz Liszt’s career as a whole, one is continually struck by the sheer range of his activities and the diversity of his affiliations. As a young boy in Vienna during the early 1820s, he absorbed the legacy of Czerny, Salieri, and Beethoven. When he died in 1886, his example was being carried forward by such radicals as Strauss, Debussy, and Busoni. His achievements in pianism, composition, teaching, and institution building are of lasting significance. He promoted musical Classicism alongside musical Romanticism. He cultivated deep and sustained social networks in Paris, Vienna, Weimar, Rome, Budapest, and elsewhere. The number of people he knew and influenced probably exceeds that of any other figure in the history of music. His personal life has been a source of fascination for nearly two centuries. Cast simultaneously as a saintly figure of extraordinary generosity who took minor religious orders in mid-life, and as a satanic virtuoso notorious for his vanity, love affairs, and habitual indulgence in tobacco and alcohol, the contradictions are striking. If it seems too much of a cliché to say he was the first rock star among pianists (a portrayal presented in Ken Russell’s film Lisztomania), one finds in Liszt nonetheless an uneasy and confounding juxtaposition of spiritual fervor with a 19th-century expression of “drugs, sex, and rock ‘n’ roll.”
Out of this extraordinary variety, how does one condense a unified, embracing image or interpretive angle? With Liszt, most historians and critics throw up their hands at the thought of reconciling the contradictions into a coherent whole, preferring to regard them as evidence of a historical era ridden with inconsistencies. As his first biographer pointed out in 1835, and as Leon Botstein reasserts in the title to his concluding essay in this volume, Liszt bears the imprint of his world more completely than any artist of the 19th century. Understanding Liszt, then, demands that we understand also the world that formed him and continued to shape him well beyond his youth.
Over the past twenty years scholars have shown an impressive determination to organize and clean up Liszt’s shop, which was left messy by a huge output of letters and music, by the geographical and linguistic dispersion of his papers, and by an enduring capacity for mythmaking on the part of his admirers as well as his detractors. In his imposing three-volume biography, the most complete work of its kind, Alan Walker has produced an engaging narrative and important reference. In the recent edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Rena Charnin Mueller and Mária Eckhardt have updated the list of works with meticulous and patient researches into Liszt’s manuscripts and first editions. Long-needed critical editions of his works and writings are well under way. The difficulty of negotiating Liszt’s correspondence has been alleviated considerably by Charles Suttoni’s bibliographic explorations and by new editions of letters to individual correspondents such as Anna Liszt, Olga von Meyerdorff, Marie d’Agoult, and Agnes Street-Klindworth. Two large documentary collections compiled by Adrian Williams, one of letters, the other of observations and reminiscences by Liszt and his contemporaries, offer English readers a textured, close-up view of his life and circumstances. All of these projects have put Liszt’s legacy on a far more solid foundation and made it much easier for the curious to find reliable information and documentation than was possible even as recently as 1985.
A disadvantage of these preoccupations is that they have tended to isolate Liszt studies in a hermetic world, relatively out of touch with the larger field of musicology, not to mention other disciplines. The resulting loss of intellectual vitality has found poor compensation in the defensive or even righteous tone that one characteristically finds in liner notes and biographies. “Once unfairly attacked in his lifetime,” Graham Robb wrote in his 1995 biography of Balzac, “the writer will forever be unfairly defended, even to his detriment, and even when the court has long since been empty. Balzac has suffered more than any other novelist from this kind of critical defense.” The words could be transferred directly to Liszt: he is defended to his detriment. He is a complex and elusive subject who can make us rethink some of the basic hierarchies of traditional historiography and analysis. His music alone confounds boundaries between national styles, between genres, between work and performer, between “authentic” and “revised” versions, between “pure” classical form and “poetic” program. Approaching him thus requires an openness to non-traditional, flexible, self-aware models of understanding. The values of an older generation of musicology—favoring structural integrity and consistency in the music, and ascetic artistic commitment in the life—tend to work against Liszt. So too does the hagiographic tone adopted by so many of his commentators and biographers, which all too clearly replicates the cultish admiration of his own audiences, colleagues, and students. The values of more recent musicology and cultural studies—with their embrace of plurality and boundary-crossing, of performance, self-fashioning, and associative meaning—should be working in his favor. Jim Samson’s embrace of these methods, combined with the best in traditional scholarship, has borne fruit in his recent, magnificent book on the Transcendental Etudes, entitled Virtuosity and the Musical Work.
The essays in this volume all concern Liszt without isolating him in the spotlight. They strive instead for a “dual focus,” taking full measure of the specialized literature and in some cases adding new archival research, but placing this information in broader historical and critical perspective than has been usual in Liszt studies. The most common second focus is the public culture of the 19th century, the domain where he arguably had the deepest and most lasting impact. Ryan Minor highlights the power of choral music in defining national and cultural communities. Comparing Liszt’s two relatively unknown “Beethoven” cantatas, written decades apart, he traces the evolution of Beethoven’s symbolic status for the broader public, of which Liszt considered himself something of a curator. James Deaville’s research into the archives of publisher Friedrich Hofmeister sheds new light on how Liszt, as represented in his published works, circulated in the commercial and material culture of the 19th century. His essay here provides uncommonly concrete evidence of the intimate links between virtuosos and sheet music publishing in the 1840s and beyond. Dana Gooley’s essay reconstructs the critique of instrumental virtuosos that developed in the early 19th century—which was founded on a social and ethical perspective as much as it was an aesthetic one—and offers explanations for how Liszt escaped it. Leon Botstein’s concluding contribution takes a long-range view of Liszt in relation to public musical culture, demonstrating multiple ways in which he adapted the older, more aristocratic values of Viennese Classicism, which he inherited as a boy, to the contexts of urban modernity of mid-19th-century musical culture, where audiences were larger, less communally educated, and immersed in a culture of fiction reading that reconstructed their experiences of time and imagination.
The two essays engaging most directly with Liszt’s musical language, which remains the least developed area of Liszt scholarship as a whole, are Susan Youens’s essay on the Heine songs, and Rainer Kleinertz’s study of the symphonic poem Orpheus in relation to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. While Liszt’s songs are generally agreed to be among his best compositions and have recently been treated with survey-like commentary, they have received remarkably little critical or interpretive attention. Youens’s essay raises the bar. Combining acute insights on Liszt’s compositional strategies with an informed view of Heine, she argues that Liszt’s progressivism in the songs is more than a merely musical project, but an extension of Heine’s own progressive program for poetry. Kleinertz’s essay on Liszt and Wagner, without engaging the vexed old question of who influenced whom, identifies Orpheus as a key link between the two composers. He fills a significant gap in music analysis: a vocabulary for discussing phrase relationships that are not organized by closure or classical periodicity.
Liszt lived or spent significant periods of time in an astonishing variety of places—Vienna, Paris, Geneva, Venice, Weimar, Budapest, and Rome—and each left an imprint on his outlook and music. Two essays here explore Liszt in relationship to specific locales. Anna Celenza provides a new angle on Liszt’s years of pilgrimage (1835–39) by showing how invested he was in a Romantic construct of Italy as a “republic of the imagination.” Her essay, with its eye for literary detail, reminds us that no matter how “real” the Italian journey was, his travel essays and evocative compositions filter his voyages through the prism of Romantic fantasy. Christopher Gibbs’s richly documented essay places Liszt’s 1838 triumphs in Vienna, which were decisive for his career, within the context of that city’s broader concert life. Comparing Liszt with other major virtuosos in the city, notably Sigismond Thalberg and Clara Wieck, it offers new perspective on the distinct physiognomy of Liszt’s concert strategies and corrects a number of errors long perpetuated in biographies.
The nineteenth century was a century of the monumental biography: Spitta on Bach, Abert on Mozart, Thayer on Beethoven, to mention some examples from music. The earlier efforts of Lina Ramann and Peter Raabe notwithstanding, tradition has only caught up with Liszt in recent times, with the work of Alan Walker, complementing significant biographical explorations by Bernard Gavoty, Serge Gut, Klára Hamburger, Emmerich Karl Horvath, and Dezsö Legány. Liszt’s contemporaries had to make do with shorter biographies written to meet tight deadlines. Three documents presented in Part II put the biographical enterprise into historical context and assist us in reimagining how Liszt might have appeared to his contemporaries. Each of these documents was produced by a confidant of Liszt and took shape from its author’s background and priorities. Joseph d’Ortigue’s 1835 study from the French press accents Liszt as a product of modern intellectual and spiritual culture—“performing Zeitgeist” as Benjamin Walton puts it in his introduction. Berlin critic Ludwig Rellstab’s biographical sketch from 1842, intended as a pamphlet to accompany Liszt’s German tours and prefaced here by Allan Keiler, pays closer attention to the virtuoso’s advocacy of German masters and his charity efforts. Rena Mueller’s presentation of Ramann’s written questionnaires to Liszt documents the methods of his first major biographer. Liszt’s written responses provide unusual glimpses into how he sought to be presented and remembered while suggesting that he was not entirely at ease with her modern philological methods. Liszt is given another chance to speak directly in Part II through a translation of one of his own writings. The issue of the true authorship of much of what was published under his name has vexed the Liszt literature since his own time, but about the contribution presented here there can be little question. The final installment of Liszt’s humanitarian essay “On the Situation of Artists and on Their Condition in Society,” a rare example of a text that survives in his own hand, is a brief but fully representative sample of the heady, somewhat chaotic mix of philosophy, spirituality, and Romantic inspiration that engulfed the young artist in the early 1830s.
Part III, “Criticism and Reception,” offers some key 19th-century documents concerning Liszt and his circle that have not been accessible, or only incompletely so, in English. Although Belgian critic François-Joseph Fétis was initially little inclined toward the Romantic young virtuoso, in his 1841 review of Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes, introduced here by Peter Bloom, he found himself at last won over. José Antonio Bowen’s selection of reviews of Liszt playing and conducting at the Bonn Beethoven festival of 1845 isolate a crucial historical moment where the values of performance and the values associated with Beethoven were being transformed by the younger generation of musicians. Of Heinrich Heine’s three incomparably entertaining and perceptive essays on Liszt, only one has been fully available in English translation (in Charles Suttoni’s An Artist’s Journey). Here we offer the other two, the second of which, as Rainer Kleinertz explains, has a complicated genesis shedding new light on the relationship between Liszt and Heine. The two published versions of this essay are presented here on facing pages to clarify how Heine changed his views and his strategies of articulation. Felix Draeseke’s defense of Liszt’s symphonic poems, introduced by James Deaville, gives voice to the progressive party in the so-called War of the Romantics, thus balancing out the better-known conservative manifesto signed by Joseph Joachim and Johannes Brahms.
Two worlds of Liszt not prominently featured in this book, although inevitably touched upon at various points, are his relationship to the Hungarian nation, which played an especially significant role during the last third of his life, and his religious faith, a lifelong preoccupation that also bloomed in his later years. The lack of emphasis upon these two areas in no way reflects the editors’ convictions about the importance of these subjects. Readers interested in Liszt’s connections with Hungary will find thorough coverage in Deszö Legány’s two-volume Liszt and His Country. Paul Merrick’s book Revolution and Religion in the Music of Franz Liszt touches upon many of the key issues in Liszt’s religious music.
Liszt’s achievements as pianist, composer, and teacher all evince a commitment to immediacy and efficacy of communication. In performance he promoted audience engagement by expressing the sense of the music in his facial expressions and body language. In his numerous piano transcriptions he would unhesitatingly violate the letter of Schubert’s and Beethoven’s scores if in doing so it would help convey to listeners the spirit of the original. In the symphonic poems Liszt articulated feelings and ideas—such as heroism, lament, passion, and love—in a direct, no-nonsense manner, so as not to interfere with the elevated themes, characters, or causes he wanted to convey. This set his symphonic music apart from Wagner, who was inclined to invest his works with metaphysical or symbolic weight, and from Brahms, where musical ideas were invented with constructive and developmental possibilities in mind. Liszt resisted esotericism and devoted himself to effective communication in protest of the inertia of urban modernity, where music was fast becoming commodified as entertainment and luxury, and thereby risked becoming trivial and marginal. Whether arguing (early on) that artists ought to be the focal point of social regeneration, or trying (later on) to revitalize the music of the weakening Catholic church through an infusion of modern music resources, he strove to close the gap between artists and contemporary audiences. In today’s world, where the task of generating audience sympathy for classical music is largely assigned to professional agents and marketers, Liszt serves as an example of where we may want to go.