By 1874, Franz Liszt was sixty-three years old and well into his fabled “vie trifurquée,” the trisected year he spent in the cities of Rome, Weimar, and Budapest on a schedule he was to maintain until his death. Since 1869 he had devoted much of his time giving master classes to a select group of musicians, many of whom eventually became the next generation of virtuosi and teachers, not only at the keyboard but also as conductors. Within the year Liszt was also to become one of the founders of the Royal Academy of Music in Pest and would serve as its first president, all the while continuing his unstinting efforts to aid the robust musical associations in Germany—in particular, the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein, for which he had served as honorary president since 1859. His touring years as a performer seemed but a dim memory. Since 1847, he had not given a piano recital for a fee, although he had appeared onstage, reinventing the role of the orchestral conductor. He was the salaried Hof-Kapellmeister of the Weimar court from 1848 to 1858; after 1859, conducting by invitation constituted a major portion of his livelihood, in addition to the modest revenues received from publishers for the sale of his music. His money was invested with Rothschild’s in Paris; his fiscal affairs were managed by his companion, the Polish princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, and anything that arose of a legal nature was handed over to his so-called cousin Eduard Liszt, one of the Royal Imperial public prosecutors in Vienna. 1
In 1874 Liszt was still the stuff of legend and the subject of numerous articles in music periodicals. Although he had ceased for the most part writing for these journals himself, his name as well as those of his closest disciples were prominent in articles, especially those dealing with the movement in Germany known as the New German School (Neu-Deutsche Schule), the group of contemporary composers centered in Weimar around Liszt, but also including Wagner (and Berlioz, simply by association). 2
In 1876 his Weimar-years companion, Princess Carolyne, was ensconced permanently in Rome, hard at work on her monumental review of Catholic dogma, Causes intérieures de la faiblesse extérieure de l’Église en 1870. 3 Since the eleventh-hour cancellation of their intended marriage in 1861, Carolyne and Liszt had maintained separate living establishments in Rome and the princess had devoted herself to her gigantic critique of church doctrine, which one might view as retribution—after all, it was the pope who had “thwarted” her nuptials to Liszt. 4 By the time of her death in 1887, twenty-four volumes of this work had been published, two of which were contentious enough to be put on the Index librorum prohibitorum. Not surprisingly, Liszt thought it best to distance himself well from Carolyne’s magnum opus. He had taken Minor Orders in 1865, and although he had not gone further in pursuit of an ecclesiastical career, he maintained a strict and carefully regimented routine of religious observation, invariably wearing his Roman collar. Although his appearance sometimes engendered a puzzled and slightly pejorative response from those who knew him well, the countenance of l’Abbé Liszt was not at all at odds with the persona of the virtuoso who had once electrified audiences with his keyboard wizardry. 5
And so, by the mid-1870s, we have an incongruous portrait of man and musician: the nineteenth-century musical superstar and the fervently religious Catholic. While Liszt himself seemed not to be bothered by this, Princess Carolyne thought he needed better public relations. She had been a formidable manager of Liszt’s business from the very beginning of their relationship, to the point of organizing his musical household almost as soon as she arrived in Weimar from the Ukraine in March 1848. While her intentions were honorable, she was less than experienced in the organization of a musician’s atelier, and her catalogue of Liszt’s compositions cannot be trusted for precise dating. 6 In 1874, perceiving that there was no accurate catalogue of Liszt’s works and no informed biographical statements available, the princess, as she had done before, took matters into her own hands: she encouraged Liszt in a major biographical effort with a Nuremberg music teacher named Lina Ramann (1833–1912).
Ramann was no stranger to things Lisztian and was already a widely traveled pedagogue. In the mid-1850s she had sailed to America and spent a year in and around Chicago, bringing music to rural communities without permanent musical establishments. Finding the semi-frontier conditions hard, and the weather even worse, she was forced by illness to return to Germany. 7 By 1858 she headed a music school for young women in Glückstadt and had begun to publish widely. Her first contact with the composer came at the Leipzig Tonkünstler-Versammlung in 1859, where Brendel, already a Liszt disciple and the editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , introduced them. 8 The following year, she dedicated the second part of her Technische Studien to the composer, who responded graciously by letter. Ramann’s personal contact with Liszt in the next decade was sporadic, but she continued to send him examples of her publications. 9
Ramann was present at the first performance of Christus in Weimar in 1873, and shortly thereafter Liszt visited her in Nuremberg. From that point, Ramann showed herself intensely interested in promoting Liszt and his music through her journalistic and pedagogical writings. 10 More important, she seemed able to overcome Liszt’s apparent lack of interest in a biographical project. In Nuremberg she first broached the subject of an analytical publication—specifically, her wish to write something about Christus. As she related in her diary, Liszt, somewhat taken aback that anyone would want to plunge into such a task, replied in uncharacteristically brusque fashion that he could not prevent her from doing so since the score was now published. 11
Why was Liszt so cool to Ramann’s project? The reason probably lay in the contemporaneous reception of his orchestral music. After sour reviews greeted the German premieres of a good number of the symphonic poems and other major orchestral works, Liszt actively discouraged their performance, except when hard-pressed. Leading the attack was the powerful Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904), who as early as 1857 castigated Les Préludes. Fast becoming the most influential music critic of his time, Hanslick had been an admirer of Liszt the pianist, but Liszt the orchestral composer, as one of the representatives of the New German School, was the target of some of his most vitriolic prose. In the second edition of his seminal work, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (“On the Musically Beautiful,” 1858), 12 Hanslick named Liszt specifically and attacked his conception of the new idiom, the Symphonic Poem (Symphonische Dichtung). 13 Liszt’s public reaction to Hanslick’s invective was silence. In the later 1850s and 1860s, counterarguments were mounted by Richard Wagner, largely from his exile in Switzerland. 14 Arguments came now as well from Liszt’s principal disciples, among them Hans Schellendorf von Bronsart (1840–1913), Brendel, Peter Cornelius (1824–74), and Richard Pohl (1826–96). 15 Thus formed the great battle between Hanslick—championing what would come to be called “absolute” music, music removed from any notions of extramusical associations emanating from art or literature—and the advocates of the Weimar school, for whom the new concept of “program music,” often inspired directly by paintings or poetry, was the key to the future. Following these polemics, Liszt’s star as a composer seemed to be dimming: the critical view of his oeuvre in the musical press in Germany became a thorn in his side, and he judiciously advised his students to refrain from programming his newer music, both symphonic and keyboard, if they wanted to further their careers. Some of these warnings were heartbreakingly resigned: In an 1859 letter to Johann von Herbeck in Vienna, Liszt wrote, “My intimate friends know perfectly well that it is not by any means my desire to push myself into any concert programme whatever.” 16 Later, his newer music, even that from 1865 on, both secular and sacred, was to confound all who surrounded him, Wagner included. 17
It was at this point that the Ramann biographical project entered the equation. Beginning in 1874, in addition to letters, she sent him written questions on pieces of foolscap, to which he dutifully replied. The planned work initially did not seem lengthy, but Ramann became the first to find that Liszt studies invariably spiral wildly out of hand. The composer had little patience with what Ramann now saw as her “mission,” although in 1875 he did agree to her proposal of an edition of his writings. He voiced his antipathetic feelings to the princess, who joined the venture like a galleon in full sail. What had started as Ramann’s attempt to publish some small articles and critiques of Liszt’s music grew into the princess’s “official” biography, albeit authored by Ramann, a project that would occupy both women even after Liszt’s death in 1886. 18 After a halting start, Liszt (in Weimar) and Ramann (in Nuremberg) visited each other several times, and in 1876, Ramann decamped to Rome for an extended stay with Princess Carolyne.
The work was far from easy. Along the way there were some heated exchanges between the two ladies, with Ramann asserting a high degree of independence and ultimately making it clear that she was not going to be Carolyne’s ghost writer. In particular the princess sought to disparage Liszt’s liaison with Countess Marie d’Agoult, the mother of his children, who had died in 1876. But despite the many obstacles put in her path by the recalcitrance of her subject, to say nothing of the omnipresence of the princess, difficult but well-meaning, the first volume of what would eventually be a three-part work appeared in 1880.
Only then did Liszt find fault with the harsh portrait of Marie d’Agoult, something the composer apparently had done nothing to prevent earlier. He was troubled by the details in the section describing their 1835 flight from Paris to Switzerland. From his markings in the dedication copy of Ramann’s first volume in the Weimar archive, a volume conspicuous for the minimal number of annotations he made in it, it is clear that he perceived this episode as having been badly handled, and one suspects the influence of the princess here. 19 Liszt softened the portrait of Marie and corrected the more egregious errors in the text, and the entire chapter was then rewritten according to Liszt’s prescription for an 1881 London edition in German of Ramann’s first volume. Here Liszt refuted the widely reported charge that it was he who had seduced the countess, making clearer that it had been a mutually arrived-at decision. Testimony from Marie d’Agoult’s brother and husband—that “Liszt is a man of honor”— found its way into that 1881 publication and became the climax of the chapter. An English translation was issued in 1882. 20
The subject matter covered in Ramann’s questionnaires and letters took the events of Liszt’s life up through 1879, but Ramann’s first volume had carried the story only through 1840. 21 Volume 2 was divided into two parts, published separately: the first part, which appeared in 1887, shortly after the composer’s death, dealt with the so-called Virtuoso Period (The Years 1839/40–1847) and contained a chronological catalogue of his works from 1839 to 1847; part two, published in 1894, subtitled Collecting and Work: Weimar and Rome (The Years 1848–1886) , continued the catalogue from 1848 to his death. 22
In the mid-1890s Ramann, having completed her formal biographical project, assembled a further collection of unpublished documents with an eye toward issuing them as a separate book, but her attention was diverted by another project exploring Liszt as pedagogue. Collecting information from pupils and acquaintances of the composer, she put together a series of commentaries—glosses—on important keyboard works, eventually publishing them under the title Liszt Pädagogium. 23 Clearly, with this slender volume Ramann returned to the Liszt she felt closest to—the piano prophet and teacher. As for the envisioned compilation, which was to include letters exchanged between Liszt and Ramann, the questionnaires transcribed here, as well as a number of highly important letters from Princess Carolyne to her, Ramann never got beyond a title and preface. For the title of the collection she chose Lisztiana , borrowing Liszt’s own sign-off in his letters to Marie d’Agoult (“Lis(z) tiana”), a sly move which she could never have slipped by the princess while she was alive. By the mid-1890s Ramann was infirm and unable to bring the material to completion, and in 1896 she gave all of her library to the recently established Liszt-Museum in Weimar. A collection of immense breadth and quality, both in printed and manuscript material, originally it had contained not only letters and documents but all of Liszt’s musical sketch and draft books, which he carried with him in the years of his European tours (1839–47). 24
In a “Nachschrift” dated December 1902, some ten years before her death, Ramann handed over the task of editing the collection to Arthur Seidl (1863–1928). Seidl (no relation to the noted conductor Anton Seidl) was an eminent writer on music, a major Wagnerian, and between 1899 and 1903, the music critic of Munich’s Neueste Nachrichten. Seidl also proved incapable of getting the book published within his lifetime, 25 however, and when he died in 1928 the manuscript lacked an index, necessary pictures, and facsimiles, and it was still in need of much editorial revision. Friedrich Schnapp, a brilliant scholar who would publish important work on Busoni, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Mozart, and Schumann, as well as Liszt, took over the project from Seidl. 26 However, the tumultuous politics of World War II and the Cold War intervened. Weimar was part of the Communist German Democratic Republic, funding was limited, and with Goethe and Schiller the most important proponents of the “heilige deutsche Kunst,” the German Communists gleefully handed over all important Liszt scholarship activity to their sister Communist state, Hungary, until well into the 1980s. 27 Only in 1983, some ninety years after its inception, and in the year of the death of the work’s third editor, did Schott Verlag finally publish Lisztiana. 28
Although we only reproduce the questionnaires here, Ramann makes it clear in her biography that, in addition to using Liszt’s responses in the questionnaires, she amplified her annotations retrospectively from correspondence with Liszt, Princess Carolyne, and others. 29 Nonetheless, we must view her reporting of verbatim conversations with Liszt with more than a fair amount of circumspection, since apart from the letters and questionnaires, no documents survive to record their interaction. The same situation holds true to some degree with the questionnaires—except here it is Liszt we must question. It would not be inaccurate to say that nearly every one of the fifteen extant questionnaires contains erroneous information imparted by the composer to Ramann with equanimity. How could this be the case?
As we have pointed out, at the beginning of this process Liszt was sixty-three years old, and he was being asked specific questions about works he had composed and events that had taken place as long as fifty years earlier. By and large, his responses were amazingly precise when one takes this span of time into consideration. Some of this unintentional misinformation, unchecked by Ramann, did get into print, and to correct it has been the work of succeeding generations of Liszt scholars. For his part, Liszt was bemused by the preoccupation of his would-be biographer with uncovering the specifics of how and where he worked. When Ramann asked what he thought was apparently an unimportant question, Liszt ironically responded, “Don’t entangle yourself in too many details. My biography is far more to be imagined than taken down in dictation.” 30 While some of the questionnaires were dated by Ramann, others were not; but for the most part, dates for the unmarked questionnaires were obtained from ancillary materials by Ramann’s designated successor, Seidl.
At the beginning Ramann did not organize her questions chronologically: the first questionnaire (August 1874) asked the composer about his Etudes, op. 1, moved directly to the question of the symphonic poems, and then returned to the earliest Lied compositions—that is, from the 1820s to the 1850s and then back to the 1840s. The third questionnaire from the same month, which has not survived, dealt with piano music, orchestral works, church music, organ works, and Lieder. This suggests that her aim was to question Liszt about his oeuvre by genre. Interspersed with questions about specific compositions are questions concerning individuals—Liszt’s parents, Marie d’Agoult, and his children are all dealt with several times. Ramann repeated questions when she felt she didn’t have enough specific information, and Liszt grew impatient in his responses to the repetitions. Sometimes, the questions were too painful for him to deal with on paper, such as the query about his son Daniel, who had died in 1859; he replied that they should talk about those events in person. Ramann also sent questionnaires to his publishers, inquiring about dates of publication. A few responded with separate letters or postcards. 31
With the publication of Lisztiana in 1983 we finally received insight into the publication turmoil that surrounded the first full-scale biography of Liszt, a vibrant artist who was, arguably, the linchpin of the nineteenth century in nearly every facet of musical activity. While Liszt’s motto, génie oblige , seemed to be his working aesthetic, we see that he was quite terse with Ramann, providing her only with the barest essentials about his compositions and his myriad musical activities. Despite this, Ramann, in the high nineteenth-century style, produced tomes that positively reeked of hero worship. From our perspective, it is easy to understand Ramann’s effulgence as she produced something akin to what Princess Carolyne wanted all along. And though subsequent generations of historians and biographers have sought to tone down Ramann’s portrait, Liszt stands as dazzling a figure to us today as he did to his contemporaries.
1. Eduard (1817–79), the youngest son of Liszt’s grandfather Georg’s third marriage, was really Liszt’s uncle, but because of their closeness in age, he called him his cousin.
2. The term had been launched by Franz Brendel in an 1859 speech in Leipzig marking the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , founded by Schumann but now seemingly a mouthpiece for the “Music of the Future,” Wagner’s Zukunftsmusik. It saw Liszt and his school as the standard-bearers of Germany’s musical future, reconciling the pure German of Bach and Beethoven with the Franco-Italian influence on German music (Handel, Gluck, Mozart).
3. Published in Rome by J. Aureli, 1872 and years following.
4. There are several studies of this complicated event: Paul Merrick’s “Liszt’s Transfer from Weimar to Rome: A Thwarted Marriage,” Studia Musicologica Hungaricae 21 (1979): 219–38; Donna Di Grazia, “Liszt, the Princess, and the Vatican: New Documents Concerning the Events of 1861,” Master’s thesis, University of California, Davis, 1986; and the same author’s “Liszt and Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein: New Documents on the Wedding That Wasn’t,” 19th-Century Music 12, no. 2 (Fall 1988): 148–62. Both Di Grazia works located and translated for the first time the primary source documents in Rome relating directly to the ecclesiastical problems encountered in 1861. Also Alan Walker, Liszt, Carolyne and the Vatican: The Story of a Thwarted Marriage , ed. Michael Saffle (Stuyvesant, N.Y.: 1991).
5. One of the most famous observations came in 1865 (albeit published many years later) from Ferdinand Gregorovius (pseud. Ferdinand Fuchsmund): “Yesterday I saw Liszt, befrocked as an abbé —he was getting out of a carriage; his black silk cassock fluttering ironically behind him—Mephistopheles disguised as an Abbé.” Römische Tagebücher von Ferdinand Gregorovius (Stuttgart: 1892), p. 300.
6. Between 1850 and 1854, the princess put together a list of titles, presumably in chronological order, of Liszt’s published and unpublished oeuvre. The manuscript is found today in Weimar (WRgs MS 141,1), but its accuracy has been found wanting. (The siglum WRgs used throughout this essay and translation is an abbreviated version of the RISM [Répertoire international des sources musicales] siglum assigned to the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar [D-WRgs]). For a description of the way in which the princess’s catalogue was compiled, see Rena Charnin Mueller, “Liszt’s Tasso Sketchbook: Studies in Sources and Revisions,” Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1986, pp. 75–82; hereafter “Liszt’s Tasso Sketchbook.” Liszt’s own Thematic Catalogue , compiled 1850–55 and published by Breitkopf & Härtel (1855), was, by its publication date, chronologically flawed as well. It appeared a year before all of the symphonic poems and many other major orchestral works were printed, thus giving a foreshortened view of the composer’s output. It would not be revised until 1877, and a complete thematic catalogue for the composer has yet to be issued.
7. See Eva Rieger, “So schlecht wie ihr Ruf? Die Liszt-Biographin Lina Ramann,” in Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 147, nos. 7–8 (July–August 1986): 16–20.
8. As a student in Leipzig, Ramann had been a pupil of Lysinka, Brendel’s wife, herself a piano student of John Field; see Rieger, “Lina Ramann,” p. 17.
9. Books she sent Liszt included her Technische Studien (Hamburg: 1860), Aus der Gegenwart (Nürnberg: 1868); Bach u. Händel (Leipzig: 1868); Die Musik als Gegenstand des Unterrichts und der Erziehung (Leipzig: 1868); Allgemeine musikalische Erziehungs und Unterrichtslehre (Leipzig: 1870).
10. James Deaville speaks of Ramann’s commission fora Liszt biography from Julius Schuberth in 1874, which apparently gave way to Breitkopf & Härtel at some point in the late 1870s; see “Lina Ramann and La Mara: Zwei Frauen, ein Schicksal,” in Frauen in der Musikwissenschaft, Dokumentation des internationalen Workshops Wien 1998 , ed. Markus Grassl and Cornelia Szabó-Knotik (Vienna: 1999), pp. 239–52.
11. Ramann, Lisztiana , ed. Friedrich Schnapp (Mainz: 1983), pp. 20–22; hereafter Lisztiana. See also Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847 (New York: 1983), pp. 6–11; hereafter The Virtuoso Years; and Franz Liszt: The Final Years, 1861–1886 (New York: 1996), pp. 275–79; hereafter The Final Years.
12. First published in four installments in the Blätter für Literatur und Kunst: Beilage der Oesterreichische-Kaiserlichen Wiener Zeitung (25 July 1853, 1 August 1853, 15 August 1853, and 13 March 1854), the first edition in book form was issued by Rudolf Weigl in Leipzig later in 1854; by 1918 there had been a dozen editions. See Eduard Hanslick: On the Musically Beautiful , trans. and ed. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis: 1986). Citing Hanslick’s autobiographical Aus meinem Leben (Berlin: 1894), vol. 1, pp. 237–38, Payzant notes that the work had earlier “been refused by the two most important publishing houses in Vienna” (p. xii).
13. See Walker, Franz Liszt: The Weimar Years, 1848–1861 (New York: 1989), pp. 360ff.; hereafter The Weimar Years. It is interesting that by 1858 Hanslick’s sole exposure to the new idiom was Les Préludes.
14. Wagner was more outwardly antagonistic toward Hanslick, even in print (he later considered naming the Meistersinger pedant who eventually came to be called Beckmesser, “Hans Lick”).
15. As the current editor of the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik , the journal established in 1834 by Robert Schumann, Brendel was primarily responsible for the eventual conflagration because of the lopsided amount of space he gave to what has been described as “the exaggerated philosophical and cultural pretensions of the writings by and about Wagner and Liszt beginning to proliferate around this time.” Thomas Grey, “Eduard Hanslick,” New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians , vol. 10 (London: 2000), pp. 827–33.
16. See La Mara, Briefe , vol. 1, pp. 332–34; translated in Constance Bache, Letters of Franz Liszt , 2 vols. (New York: 1894), vol. 1, pp. 399–402.
17. Some of Wagner’s most vitriolic comments were made in front of Liszt and later preserved for posterity through the diaries of his wife, Cosima, who was Liszt’s daughter. See Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher , ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack, 2 vols. (München: 1976–77). The English translations are available in an edition by Geoffrey Skelton (New York: 1978–80).
18. The princess survived Liszt by only eight months, and died in Rome in March 1887.
19. WRgs MS 59/350. Corrections to vol. 1 by Princess Marie von Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Carolyne’s daughter, are found in WRsg MS 59/323; Ramann’s own corrections are in WRgs MS 59/353.
20. The English translation by Miss M. E. Cowdery suffered from the translator’s evident lack of musical expertise, although it did contain a new preface and many of Ramann’s corrections, especially those suggested by Liszt in the chapter on Marie d’Agoult. Walker (The Final Years , p. 279) mentions a concurrent, aborted American translation undertaken by Sara Hershey Eddy of Chicago, described in a January 1884 letter from Mrs. Eddy to Carrie Lachmund (not to her husband, the Liszt pupil Carl Lachmund, as Walker states); this translation has never been found.
21. It is important to note that Ida Marie Lipsius, under the pseudonym La Mara, was also engaged in a biographical project on Liszt in the late 1870s. She later turned her full attention to the editing of Liszt’s letters, and as James Deaville has pointed out, used similar questionnaires in her research for the letter volumes, apparently in a like-minded quest for veracity: see Deaville, “Lina Ramann,” p. 245ff.
22. It also included an index of his writings, a listing of the contents of the six volumes Ramann herself had edited for Breitkopf & Härtel between 1880 and 1883, the project that delayed the completion of the final part of the biography. Liszt’s writings are now being issued in a new series entitled Sämtliche Schriften by Breitkopf & Härtel under the general editorship of Detlef Altenburg (1989–).
23. Liszt Pädagogium: Klavier-Kompositionen Franz Liszt’s nebst noch unedierten Veränderungen, Zusätzen und Kadenzen nach des Meisters Lehrer Pädagogisch Glossirt (Liszt pedagogy: Franz Liszt’s piano compositions pedagogically interpreted according to his teachings from thus far unedited changes, additions, and cadenzas) (Leipzig: 1902). Ramann used information she had assembled from Liszt pupils and acquaintances (August Stradal, Berthold Kellermann, August Göllerich, Heinrich Porges, Ida Volckmann, and Auguste Rennebaum), printing fascinating information on performance practice for important works as varied as the B Minor Sonata, Funérailles, Consolations , three Hungarian Rhapsodies, and the Robert le Diable fantasy.
24. See Mueller, “Liszt’s Tasso Sketchbook,” for a complete description of all of the extant Weimar sketchbooks, which still retain their original numbering from the Ramann Bibliothek. The idea of a Franz-Liszt memorial foundation and museum was actually in the air before Liszt’s death, initiated by the head of the Grand Ducal family in Weimar, Carl Alexander; see August Göllerich, Franz Liszt (Berlin: 1908), p. 194. After Liszt’s death (31 July 1886) and that of Princess Carolyne (9 March 1887), the Liszt Museum was established, funded by a grant of 70,000 gulden from Marie Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Carolyne’s daughter. The foundation was inaugurated by the Allgemeine Deutsche Musikverein on 22 October 1887, which would have been the composer’s seventy-sixth birthday.
25. From our vantage point, it is clear why Seidl was unable to complete the editorial work on Lisztiana in time for the 1911 centenary celebrations of Liszt’s birth—it was an enormous task. To accomplish it he had to make himself into a Liszt scholar of Ramann’s breadth—and it took him twenty-four years, something he recognized and apologized for in his 1912 memorial piece for Ramann (“mea culpa, mea maxima culpa”) . Seidl devoted his principal efforts to the life and works of Richard Strauss, and his most important book, Straussiana: Aufsätze zur Richard Strauss-Frage aus drei Jahrzehnten , appeared in Regensburg in 1913. Clearly, Seidl’s inspiration for the title of his Straussiana followed the fashion of Ramann’s title for her compendium, Lisztiana.
26. When in 1926 Seidl felt at last that the Liszt book was ready for the public, he shepherded his manuscript through his press of choice, Gustav Bosse Verlag, where the materials reached the page-proof stage and then came to an abrupt halt. Seidl’s health was also failing. According to the editorial preface by Friedrich Schnapp in the Lisztiana collection published many decades later, Seidl, shortly before his death in 1928, voiced to his wife, Dorothee, his wish that Schnapp would take over the final editorial work. (Schnapp, “Zur Textvorlage, zur Textrevision und zu den Bildbeigaben,” Lisztiana , pp. 9–10.)
Schnapp tells of his painstaking revision of the already typeset text, the compilation of an index done together with Seidl’s wife, and the preparation of the plates of the pictures and facsimiles (“[…] die Klischees der Bilder- und Faksimile-Beigaben herstellen lassen”). Then “disastrous circumstances” (verhängnissvolle Zeiten) overcame them, clearly an indirect reference to nascent Nazism, which threatened their very existence. Seidl and his wife may have been Jewish; Schnapp’s religion is unknown, but it seems unlikely that he was Jewish, since he published during the war, in a markedly Nazi-oriented volume in honor of Peter Raabe. (Schnapp’s “Verschollene Kompositionen Franz Liszt” came out in 1942 in Von Deutscher Tonkunst: Festschrift zu Peter Raabes 70. Geburtstag , ed. Alfred Morgenroth [Leipzig]. Raabe, the foremost Liszt scholar in Germany, succeeded Richard Strauss as president of the Reichsmusikkammer in 1937). But the turmoil of the war had a devastating effect on Bosse Verlag.
Further biographical information on Schnapp is scant. He was a confidant of Wilhelm Furtwängler during the war when he (Schnapp) was acting as chief recording engineer for Nordwestdeutschen Rundfunk. Schnapp appears to have been one of those individuals who stayed well below the radar of high-flown Nazi publicity (unlike Peter Raabe, Liszt’s principal biographer between the two world wars, who was in the thick of things), and when the East German state was established, he crossed over comfortably and was apparently not subject to any de-Nazification processes by his new employers. There is little evidence of his working in the West apart from publications issued by West German firms; he was a freelance musicologist without a permanent academic position and moved without restraint in the pursuit of his scholarly research, publishing jointly with such eminent scholars as László Somfai and Wolfgang Plath. He remains, and Pamela Potter agrees, that Schnapp was, indeed, a spectral character. See Pamela Potter, “Musicology Under Hitler: New Sources in Context,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 49, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 70–113).
27. Schnapp’s preface refers to a long period before interest in Liszt was renewed, an oblique reference to the post—World War II neglect of Liszt by the German Democratic Republic, where the Weimar archives were located. Originally, Ramann’s Nachlass was split into three groups among the Weimar establishments: the musical manuscripts and her large collection of Liszt’s printed music went to the Liszt-Museum; the manuscript materials for the biography went to the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv; and the pictures were deposited in the Goethe-Haus on the Frauenplan, the headquarters of the Goethe Nationalmuseum. After World War II, most of the musical manuscripts in the small Liszt-Museum went to the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv; the printed materials in the Liszt-Museum were shifted to the prints section of the National Forschungs- und Gedenkstätte der klassischen deutschen Literatur in Weimar and housed in both the Schloss-Bibliothek (formerly the Zentral-Bibliothek) and the Anna-Amalia-Bibliothek. In the 1990s, the prints were reunited in the Schloss-Bibliothek, and as a result escaped the devastating fire in September 2004 that destroyed many of the important collections housed in the Anna-Amalia-Bibliothek.
28. In “Verschollene Kompositionen Franz Liszts,” Schnapp utilized much information from the still unpublished Lisztiana materials to document his work, without bothering to mention that it had been entrusted to him by Seidl.
29. Some of the original questionnaires have disappeared and survive only in the text of Lisztiana. Ramann also expanded on her queries by including a series often “Supplementary Letters” (“Ergänzende Briefe”) dating from 1873, 1884, and 1886, some of which were printed for the first time in Lisztiana (pp. 427–35). These letters, all held in the Weimar “Ramann Bibliothek,” contained interesting biographical material written in response to Ramann’s inquiries from Cosima Wagner (I), Fritz Stade (II), Clara Schumann, along with Liszt’s response to Clara (III), and the Grand Duke Carl Alexander (IV), the latter already printed in Adelheid von Schorn’s memoir Das nachklassische Weimar (Weimar: 1912).
30. “Verwickeln Sie sich nicht in zu vielen Details: Meine Biographie ist weit mehr zu erfinden als nachzuschreiben,” WRgs MS 59/351, 1, no. 15, dated 1878; reproduced in Ramann, Lisztiana , p. 407.
31. All extant items are in Weimar today in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, WRgs MS 59/359, 4.