Do not entangle yourself in too many details.
LISZT TO LIN A RAMANN, c.18811
I fear that [Ramann] will be unable to see the wood for the trees.
LISZT TO PRINCESS VON SAYN-WITTGENSTEIN, 1877.2
The normal way biography is written is to allow the basic materials—letters, diaries, manuscripts—to disclose the life. And if those materials are missing, one goes out and finds them. That did not happen with Liszt. Because of the unparalleled fame, even notoriety, enjoyed by Liszt during his lifetime (eclipsing by far that of all his musical contemporaries), a complete reversal of the “normal” process took place. Everywhere he went Liszt lived out his life in a blaze of publicity. People clamoured for literature about him. And so the biographies came first; the hard evidence turned up later. Most of the energy expended by the modern Liszt researcher has to do with correcting the former in the light of the latter. Liszt himself entertained no illusions about his biographers. They often irritated him, and for good reason; some of them, as we shall discover, had a genuine talent for invention. Occasionally Liszt corrected their work. By the time he had reached old age, however, he was resigned to his fate: the groundwork for that generous supply of misinformation, half-truth, and legend which taints the Liszt literature to this day had already been prepared.
The earliest biography was that of Joseph d’Ortigue (1802–66), whose “Etude biographique” was published in the Gazette Musicale de Paris in 1835, when Liszt, already a European figure, was only twenty-three years old. It was based on materials supplied by Anna Liszt, his mother, and Countess Marie d’Agoult, his first mistress—a combination of sources not likely to inspire confidence.3 Liszt himself was dissatisfied with it, little realizing, when he suggested one or two changes, that it was the harbinger of much worse to come. Six years later, in 1841, Johann Wilhelm Christern (1809–77) came forward with his panegyric Franz Liszts Leben und Wirken. A valuable copy of this rare book, now in the possession of the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., was corrected and annotated by Liszt himself. His corrections reveal the extent of Christern’s shortcomings, and the remarkable objectivity with which Liszt viewed himself as a biographical topic, a rarely acknowledged aspect of his character. Liszt’s editorial changes, made on interleaved blank pages in pen and ink,4 cover the details of his early childhood, his amours, his religious leanings. These changes are sometimes detrimental even to Liszt himself, and spoil Christern’s idealized image of him. In fact, they are a model of common sense and good taste, and set a standard of decency for his later biographers which, unfortunately, these ladies and gentlemen were disinclined to follow. The very next year, 1842, saw the publication of Franz Liszt by the Berlin critic Ludwig Rellstab (1799–1860). This hastily assembled collection of reviews and newspaper articles was timed to coincide with Liszt’s long-awaited concerts in Berlin, which he gave during the winter of 1841–42. Two years later, in 1844, Gustav Schilling (1803–81) wrote his Franz Liszt: Sein Leben und sein Wirken aus nächster Beschauung. This book, too, was evidently intended to capitalize on Liszt’s successful tours of Europe. Liszt must have read both books, but his reactions are unknown.
Already these early publications establish the model for the later ones. Neither F. J. Fétis, in his Liszt entry in the Biographie universelle des musiciens (1844, 2d ed. 1875), nor Ludwig Nohl, in his Franz Liszt (1882), shows much advance on d’Ortigue’s pioneering effort—not, at any rate, as far as the early part of Liszt’s career is concerned. By 1850, in fact, the hard information about his childhood and early youth had become stubbornly fixed in the literature, and even though much of it is palpably false (for instance, the supposed public embrace by Beethoven during the boy’s 1823 “farewell” recital in Vienna), it is dutifully repeated to this day. These, then, are custom-built biographies, instantly recognizable as such. They take in one another’s paragraphs as friendly neighbours take in one another’s washing: they neither give nor receive any public acknowledgement for such a basic, mutual activity.5
The reader already familiar with the broad outlines of Liszt’s life will recall that the early 1840s were years of crisis in his relationship with Countess Marie d’Agoult. This liaison terminated, in fact, in 1844. The full story of that ill-starred romance and its tragic consequences for the lovers themselves, and above all for their three children, will be told in its proper place. What has to be observed here is that Marie was humiliated, and her humiliation quickly turned to hatred. In 1846, after she had adopted her well-known pseudonym “Daniel Stern,” she dipped her pen in vitriol and published her first novel, Nélida (the title of which is an anagram of the name Daniel). This work is a thinly disguised account of Liszt and Madame d’Agoult herself, in which Liszt is depicted as Guermann, a painter who is artistically impotent, and Marie as Nélida, a woman of noble breeding who, despite her selfless devotion to Guermann, is callously abandoned. This autobiographical novel was first published in serial form in 1846 in the Revue Indépendante; it then reappeared almost at once in hardcover.6 Its publication caused Liszt some embarrassment. Not content to insert the blade, Marie twisted the hilt. A second edition of her book appeared in 1866 and did him professional harm in France. But still worse was to follow. In 1869, when Liszt was fifty-eight years old and an abbé of the Roman Catholic Church, a young pupil, Olga Janina, the so-called Cossack Countess, crossed his path. Olga was pathological. She became briefly enamoured of Liszt, who, after trying to shake her off, was a witness to her attempted suicide in his Budapest apartment. Olga finally left the Hungarian capital to avoid deportation by the police.7 These experiences seemed sufficient to justify this twenty-year-old girl’s going into retirement to write her “memoirs,” the first batch of which appeared as an autobiographical novel, Souvenirs d’une cosaque (1874), under the pseudonym “Robert Franz.” Then, lest her readership fail to grasp the facts behind her fiction, she wrote two further novels, “replies” to the first, called Les Amours d’une cosaque par un ami de l’Abbé “X,” and Le Roman du pianiste et de la cosaque (1874–75). For these two literary efforts Olga felt constrained to adopt another pseudonym, “Sylvia Zorelli.” In his brilliant exposé of this troublesome parasite, the Hungarian scholar Dezsö Legány shows that Olga’s real name was not Janina but Zielinska.8 She took the name Janina from her husband, Karel Janina Piasecki, whom she married in her eighteenth year and then abandoned, because it had a better “ring” to it among the aristocratic circles of Central Europe in which she wanted to mix. She was not a Cossack; least of all was she a countess. Whatever pretensions she had to a moneyed background she owed to her father, Ludwik Zielinski, who manufactured boot polish in Lemberg. Everything that Olga tells us about herself in her books is pure fiction, created to obscure her mundane origins. It is truly astonishing that the slander she spread about Liszt, which caused him pain in his old age, is still believed today. The scandal no longer lies in Olga’s books; it lies in the books of those who continue to cite what she said in order to add a dash of colour to what might otherwise be a drab account of Liszt’s final years. We shall have occasion to meet Olga Zielinska-Piasecka again in Volume III of the present biography.
Liszt had now become a dubious figure to the world at large. His close friends, pupils, and acquaintances grieved to see this great artist depicted as a buffoon. They lamented the absence of any serious biographer, someone who would view Liszt’s life with scholarly concern rather than merely help to bury it under a growing mound of literary debris. Liszt’s two great contemporaries Schumann and Chopin, co-founders with him of the Romantic movement in music, had already found outstanding biographers. Joseph Wasielewski’s Robert Schumann had appeared as early as 1858, and Moritz Karasowski’s Life of Chopin followed in 1877. Both are foundation works on their respective composers. And both books, not unnaturally, cast Liszt in a minor supporting role. Liszt was now sixty-six, and approaching the twilight of his life. Where was his biographer? It was at this point that Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, his second mistress and companion for thirty years, decided to intervene.
Whatever Liszt’s later biographers have said against Carolyne, and they have said a great deal, it was never possible for them to charge her with harbouring spite and animosity towards Liszt, a man she loved with fierce and proud possessiveness down to the day of her death. Unlike Marie d’Agoult, Carolyne never turned on Liszt, never publicly maligned and defamed his character. In fact, it was her dearest wish to see that her idol had a lasting monument, a multivolume “authorized” biography written by an independent scholar. The story of how an obscure music teacher named Lina Ramann (1833–1912) took on the awesome task of writing Liszt’s biography makes fascinating reading.9 Until recently it was thought that Ramann was an accomplice of the princess, appointed to carry out her directives. Thanks to the belated publication of Ramann’s Lisztiana (1983), we can see that her original research was far more extensive than anyone had supposed. Through her diary entries, her personal reminiscences of Liszt and Carolyne, and, above all, the biographical questionnaires that she sent to Liszt, we are afforded a rare glimpse into the biographer’s workshop.
Ramann would doubtless have been capable of writing a dispassionate biography if she had been left to get on with it. The German press had warmly praised two of her earlier books;10 and an article on Liszt’s music published before she knew him shows that she was not antipathetic to her subject. But the princess had some old scores to settle. She set out to influence Ramann’s text and attempted to alter it to her advantage. After 1878, the conflict between the two became acute, and Ramann had to fight to retain her integrity. “Do you really think that I am an instrument whose mechanism can be controlled according to the will of the player?” she asked Carolyne. “Can I see only with your eyes, think only your thoughts, feel only your feelings?”11 On one issue, however, Ramann failed to resist the princess: Marie d’Agoult (whom the princess never met but with whom she knew posterity would compare her) was cast in the poorest light. Since Marie died in 1876, shortly before the chapter on her was written, she had no opportunity to defend herself. There is little question that Cosima Wagner was right when she charged that this mendacious attack on her mother was inspired by the princess. Ramann’s Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch occupied her for twenty years. Although her style is fulsome, even fawning, it was not unusual for the nineteenth century to idealize its heroes, and it was widely believed that her book had, at last, done justice to its subject.
But in 1933–34 a literary event of capital importance occured. Daniel Ollivier, Liszt’s grandson, published the Correspondance de Liszt et de la Comtesse d’Agoult in two volumes.12 Now, for the first time, we were given the other side of the picture. This publication represented nothing less than the moral rehabilitation of Marie d’Agoult. Throughout Liszt’s long years abroad, especially the period 1838–47, when he was away on concert tours, he had maintained a regular correspondence with Marie. She preserved some five hundred of his letters to her; most of hers to him were destroyed. These letters quickly became an essential tool for all subsequent Liszt research. They are full of lively observations, of great practical interest to the biographer. Liszt’s tours took him all over Europe. With the practised eye of a seasoned traveller, he packed his letters with minute detail. People, places, events—all were brought to life for Marie, who could only share his spectacular successes at a distance. Included in this correspondence were great and moving love letters, in the grand Romantic tradition, and they proved conclusively that far from being the passing diversion Ramann had made her out to be, Marie was at the heart of Liszt’s emotional life for ten years.
Neither the princess nor Ramann could be sure that this remarkable collection of letters still existed when they embarked on their posthumous campaign of denigration against Marie d’Agoult. But they felt reasonably safe. Marie, after all, had silently hugged these letters to herself for thirty-five years or more. Why had she not used them in her bitter quarrels with Liszt? She was surely deterred by a simple reservation: she, in turn, could not be certain that her letters to Liszt had been destroyed, that they might not some day be used against her. The Correspondance posed a mutual threat. The result was a stalemate. Since 1934 the question has often been asked: How far was Liszt implicated in Ramann’s biography? The answer is clearly important to some scholars, since Liszt’s honour appears, to them, to be at stake. This was the chief talking-point of The Man Liszt (1934) by Ernest Newman, the most vocal of Liszt’s critics. Certainly Liszt gave Ramann a number of interviews in the late 1870s; much of the information about his early years, in fact, could have come only from him.13 But there was no suggestion that he was asked even to approve the manuscript before publication. That fact ceases to be astonishing once we remember the context within which the enterprise unfolded. Ramann lived in Nuremberg, Carolyne lived in Rome (she and Liszt had not lived together since 1860, twenty years earlier, and saw little of one another). He was an elderly man. He had been publicly praised and pilloried all his life. He had made at least two attempts conscientiously to correct the work of previous biographers. Enough was enough. Polite lack of interest seems to have been Liszt’s attitude towards his “official” biography. For the rest, a glance at the dates settles two-thirds of the question: the last two volumes were published after Liszt’s death.
A page from Lina Ramann’s biography, with Liszt’s handwritten corrections. (illustration credit fm1.1)
The most incriminating piece of evidence against Liszt is his personal copy of volume 1, now in the Weimar archives, which contains a number of marginal notes in his own handwriting, made sometime after 1880. The chapter on Marie was left untouched. That, say his critics, points to his complicity. Not one of them perceived an alternative, and very human, explanation. Since Liszt knew that this chapter was the work of Carolyne, he faced an almost impossible choice: he could either pick up his pen and expose her, or he could do nothing and risk being exposed himself. He was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. As his eye roved across those pages it must have paused at one of Carolyne’s sentences: “He was too noble and too proud to abandon a woman at a moment when she had a right to appeal to his heart.” Liszt, we may be sure, savoured the irony of these words to the full.
There are fashions in all things; biography is no exception. Marie d’Agoult is generally perceived today as a “wronged woman.” Is this a definitive picture? Her cri de coeur, uttered only three years after their sensational elopement to Geneva, and enshrined forever in her Mémoires (“Franz had abandoned me for such small motives!”), has haunted Liszt’s biographers for half a century; they have been hard pressed to handle the accusation dispassionately. Ever since the publication of Jacques Vier’s masterly La Comtesse d’Agoult et son temps in six volumes (1955–63), however, it has been clear that the “long-suffering” image of Marie is not entirely truthful and would itself have to be revised. Vier had access to many unpublished archives in France. He toiled for more than fifteen years on his magnum opus and consulted, among other esoteric documents, the hitherto unknown diaries of Charles d’Agoult, the husband whom Marie had in turn abandoned. By the time the first volume of Vier’s biography of Marie appeared, he had already made two extremely useful contributions to the Liszt literature,14 and was therefore well equipped to do his subject justice. The picture that emerges is refreshingly candid. Vier had a great respect for evidence, and he went where it led him; he had no interest in writing a book that would merely please Marie’s admirers. He demonstrated that the frustrations with which Marie was undoubtedly beset after her ten-year liaison with Liszt was finally ended sprang as much from the divisions in her complex make-up as from her association with the famous pianist. She would, in all likelihood, have been a “wronged woman” whoever crossed her path. It is clearly in Liszt’s posthumous interests to incorporate Vier’s scholarly findings into any subsequent biography of the man, since few aspects of his life have been more severely criticized in modern times than his “abandonment” of Madame d’Agoult. If, therefore, the present life of Liszt treats Marie with somewhat less deference than is customary nowadays, that is because the balance of evidence has started to shift away from her, and that fact must inevitably affect the narrative.
Meanwhile, what of Liszt’s other letters? The really important collections had been available to scholars for many years, although it has to be said that this was rarely reflected in the literature. They were mostly published during the period 1893–1918 under the editorship of La Mara (Marie Lipsius, 1837–1927). The chief volumes are
Franz Liszts Briefe (8 vols.), Leipzig, 1893–1905:
vol. 1, Von Paris bis Rom
vol. 3, Briefe an eine Freundin
vols. 4–7, Briefe an die Fürstin Sayn-Wittgenstein
vol. 8, Neue Folge zu Band I und II
Briefe hervorragender Zeitgenossen an Franz Liszt (3 vols.), Leipzig, 1895–1904
Briefwechsel zwischen Franz Liszt und Carl Alexander, Grossherzog von Sachsen, Leipzig, 1909
Franz Liszts Briefe an seine Mutter, Leipzig, 1918.
La Mara was fifty-six years old when she published the first volume of Liszt’s letters in 1893. By the time she had finished her great task, with the appearance of her last volume in 1918, she was an old lady of eighty-one. Such tireless devotion to Liszt’s cause commands respect. La Mara edited other important collections, too, including Liszt’s correspondence with Wagner and with Hans von Bülow. Altogether she had made at least four thousand letters (either to or from Liszt) available to his biographers by the year 1918. Why were they so rarely consulted? They are source documents of some significance; they illuminate a great personality possessed of a warm generosity of spirit and an enormous range of interests. Liszt’s worldwide connections alone are of perennial fascination.
It must be stressed that, valuable though they are, these are not “critical” editions. La Mara did not scruple to omit a number of letters from the series. She also subjected some of the correspondence to censorship. Perhaps the material to suffer most was the Briefe an eine Freundin, which is known to the world only in its mutilated form. The anonymous Freundin was Agnès Street-Klindworth, who, according to La Mara, became a pupil of Liszt in the 1850s during his tenure at Weimar. La Mara first gained access to these letters through the good offices of Agnès Street’s elder son, George, in 1892, and she appears to have been taken aback by their content. There was evidence that Liszt and Agnès had not only forged a strong emotional bond during the years 1853–55, but had also become lovers, one of their secret trysts being her apartment on the Carlsplatz, less than a mile from the Altenburg, where Liszt now lived with his “official” mistress, Princess von Sayn-Wittgenstein. Liszt confided to Agnès his frustrations over the tug-of-war he was then enduring with Marie d’Agoult over the future of their three children, whom he was about to remove from Paris to Germany, and he allowed himself to make some ambivalent references to his family in unguarded moments. La Mara doubtless thought that she was serving many interests by expurgating all the “sensitive” material these letters contained. After all, Cosima Liszt-Wagner was still alive and would have been sure to protest at this treatment of herself and her father. Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein, the daughter of the princess, could also have construed these uncensored letters to be a slur on her mother’s memory. Then there was Liszt himself, who had asked Agnès to destroy all his letters (he had consigned hers to the flames) and who would have been deeply perturbed to think that his request had been ignored. By publishing a mutilated version of the letters, however, La Mara cast a shadow over her editorial work in general and created a climate of unease among modern Liszt scholars. Nothing short of a revised edition of her eleven volumes will satisfy the requirements of modern scholarship, a daunting enterprise which has not yet even begun and which is unlikely to be carried out in this century. Until then, the luckless Liszt biographer is well advised to consult the holographs or the Abschriften, which are held in Weimar, and to compare them carefully with La Mara’s published texts.
The reverential attitude which La Mara adopted towards her work is symbolized by her prefaces to these volumes, most of which are signed “La Mara, October 22,” irrespective of the actual year in which they were published. This particular day, of course, was Liszt’s birthday, and La Mara’s editorial work does indeed form a remarkable gift to his memory. La Mara had known Liszt personally. She had met him for the first time in Weimar, in 1856, as an impressionable girl of nineteen, and had been at once ensnared by his powerful personality. In her autobiography,15 written some sixty years later, she still held Liszt in awe, and found a perfect title for her chapter on him, which even her severest critics could not improve upon: “Liszt, My Destiny.” There was, in fact, a touch of absurdity about her particular brand of hero worship, which reached its peak in her volume Liszt und die Frauen (1911). This book contains twenty-six biographies of women whom Liszt is supposed to have esteemed. It bears the dedication “zum 100. Geburtstag Liszts,” surrounded by a decorative border of hearts. Those women who tainted Liszt’s life with scandal (Lola Montez and Olga Janina, for example) have been excluded.
La Mara’s editions of Liszt’s correspondence are misleading in one other respect, albeit a minor one. While the titles are in German, the contents are mainly in French, the language in which Liszt always preferred to communicate. Liszt, in fact, was never at home in the German language. It is true that he was brought up in a German-speaking part of western Hungary, by German-speaking parents, and that German was therefore his mother tongue. But from the age of eleven, after he had moved to Paris, he was educated in French. (The ease with which the young boy made the linguistic transition is borne out by a juvenile letter to Sébastien Erard, which he wrote while on a visit to London when he was twelve years old, and which already shows an idiomatic grasp of the language.16) Thereafter he lost his German; it was only in later life and with difficulty that he recovered its partial use. This is rather surprising when we recall that the mature Liszt spent thirteen years (1848–61) in Weimar. But the facts speak for themselves. Here are a few passages culled from his correspondence covering a period of twenty-two years or more. The italics are Liszt’s.
Excuse the spelling and writing of these lines! You know that I never write German.17
Allow me … to thank you … in French, as this language becomes more and more familiar and easy to me, whereas I am obliged to make an effort to patch up more or less unskillfully my very halting German syntax.18
What do you say to my German scribbling? I would give a lot if I could get it to the point where, little by little, I could prepare my essays for the press in German. It feels to me all the time, however, like finger exercises in syntax.19
Forgive me, that I write to you today in German.20
Examples of his “very halting German syntax” abound. As early as 1833 Liszt had sometimes written letters to Marie d’Agoult in which he temporarily lapsed into faulty German. But it is his letters to his Austrian-born mother that provide the most telling evidence. Here, if anywhere, we would expect Liszt to revert to his mother tongue. Mostly, however, he writes to her in French. These letters to Anna Liszt have never been published in their original language. When La Mara eventually brought out her selection, in 1918, it was in her own German translation, under the aforementioned title Franz Liszts Briefe an seine Mutter.
Liszt’s letters continue to be published in modern times. Two substantial volumes can be mentioned here: Franz Liszt: Briefe aus ungarischen Sammlungen, 1835–8621 (1966) and The Letters of Franz Liszt to Olga von Meyendorff, 1871–8622 (1979). At the time of writing there are six thousand published letters between Liszt and eight hundred correspondents across the world. These are the staggering figures given in Charles Suttoni’s authoritative bibliography23 (1979) of Liszt’s published correspondence. Since many unpublished holographs still lurk in the archives of Paris, Bayreuth, and Weimar, these numbers are bound to be revised upwards with the passing years.24
Another basic source for the modern biographer is Liszt’s Gesammelte Schriften. These six volumes of “collected writings”—books, essays, pamphlets—were gathered together and published during the period 1880–83, that is, within Liszt’s lifetime at the instigation of Princess Carolyne. The earliest essay to appear over Liszt’s signature, “On Future Church Music,” dated from 1834; the latest, “John Field and His Nocturnes,” from 1859. Since these writings were scattered, and since most of them were originally written in French, the task of assembling them and translating them into German was given to Lina Ramann. She failed to find them all, and the Gesammelte Schriften is therefore incomplete.
vol. 1: F. Chopin (1852)
vol. 2 (i): Essays from the “Revue et Gazette Musicale”
On Future Church Music (1834–35)
On the Position of Artists and Their Place in Society (1835)
On Popular Editions of Important Works (1836)
On Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots (1837)
Thalberg’s Grande Fantaisie, op. 22, and Caprices, opp. 15 and 19 (1837)
To M. Fétis (1837)
R. Schumann’s Piano Compositions, opp. 5, 11, and 14 (1837)
Paganini: A Necrology (1840)
vol. 2 (ii): Letters of a Bachelor of Music (1835–40)
| 1–3. | To George Sand |
| 4. | To Adolphe Pictet |
| 5. | To Louis de Ronchaud |
| 6. | By Lake Como (to Louis de Ronchaud) |
| 7. | La Scala (to M. Schlesinger) |
| 8. | To Heinrich Heine |
| 9. | To Lambert Massart |
| 10. | On the Position of Music in Italy (to M. Schlesinger) |
| 11. | St. Cecilia (to M. d’Ortigue) |
| 12. | To Hector Berlioz |
The essays which constitute both parts of volume 2 were later republished in their original French versions by Jean Chantavoine in his important book Pages romantiques (1912). This source is preferable to the Gesammelte Schriften, since Chantavoine went directly to the issues of the Gazette Musicale in which these texts were originally published, and he did not subject them to the editorial changes that mar the German translation. For the most part, the Bachelor of Music letters take the form of a travelogue in which Liszt (and Marie d’Agoult) recorded their impressions of music and musical life in Italy during their “honeymoon” years. Modelled on George Sand’s Lettres d’un voyageur, their primary purpose was to inform Liszt’s friends in France of his activities abroad. Writing in the 1860s, Sainte-Beuve found it incredible that thirty years earlier one carried on one’s life through the columns of a newspaper. “A sheet with five thousand subscribers,” he remarked, “was practically a family of intimates.”
vol. 3 (i): Pages about Dramatic and Stage Works
Gluck’s Orpheus (1854)
Beethoven’s Fidelio (1854)
Weber’s Euryanthe (1854)
On Beethoven’s Music to Egmont (1854)
On Mendelssohn’s Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1854)
Scribe and Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (1854)
Schubert’s Alfonso und Estrella (1854)
Auber’s La Muette de Portici (1854)
Bellini’s Montecchi e Capuletti (1854)
Boieldieu’s La Dame blanche (1854)
Donizetti’s La favorita (1854)
Pauline Viardot-Garcia (1859)
No Entr’acte Music! (1855)
Mozart: On the Occasion of his Centenary Festival in Vienna (1856)
vol. 3 (ii): Richard Wagner
Tannhäuser and the Song Contest on the Wartburg (1849)
Lohengrin and Its First Performance at Weimar (1850)
Der fliegende Holländer (1854)
Das Rheingold (1855)
vol. 4: From the Annals of Progress
Berlioz and his Harold Symphony (1855)
Robert Schumann (1855)
Clara Schumann (1855)
Robert Franz (1855)
John Field and His Nocturnes (1859)
vol. 5: Incursions: Critical, Polemical, and Topical Essays
On the Goethe Foundation at Weimar (1850)
Weimar’s September Festival in Honour of the Centenary of Carl August’s Birth (1857)
Dornröschen: Genast’s Poem and Raff’s Music (1855)
Marx and His Book The Music of the Nineteenth Century (1855)
Criticism of Criticism: Ulibishev and Serov (1858)
A Letter on Conducting: A Defence (1853)
vol. 6: On the Gypsies and Their Music in Hungary (1859)
Doubt has been cast on the true authorship of these writings.25 Liszt relied on a number of people to get his ideas down on paper, but the ideas are still his. In the 1850s, especially, he had secretaries, transcribers, translators, and researchers virtually at his beck and call. Even if it could be proved that much of his work was “ghosted” (and it cannot), Liszt quite clearly held himself responsible for the results, and the conscientious biographer must become acquainted with their contents. Liszt’s credentials as an author are explained in detail elsewhere in this book.26 The main figure behind the controversy will emerge as this survey unfolds.
Clearly, less than half a century after Liszt’s death his biographers had a formidable task on their hands. Simply to master and evaluate the available material was a daunting enterprise. Add to this the interminable flow of “recollections,” “memories,” and “diaries” of his pupils and disciples that came off the printing presses in a flood after 1900 and you have a tangled mass of contradictions through which the modern Liszt scholar picks his way with trepidation. Liszt’s Weimar masterclasses attracted some of the most brilliant young pianists of the day. Rosenthal, Tausig, Bülow, Siloti, Friedheim—the illustrious roll-call reads like a Burke’s Peerage of the realm of pianists—were all pupils of Liszt. There were also many worthless hangers-on, whom Liszt was too soft-hearted to turn away. (Liszt never charged a penny for these classes.) But whoever they were, the quick or the dead, it seemed as if personal contact with Liszt, however slight, was sufficient to stimulate the most recalcitrant pen into activity. Thus, one of the earliest “memoirs” to appear was Anton Strelezki’s27 Personal Recollections of Chats with Liszt (1893), and one of the latest was Arthur Friedheim’s Life and Liszt (1961). In between, there were dozens of other “reminiscences” by Liszt’s pupils, including Siloti’s My Memories of Liszt (1913) and Lamond’s Memoirs (1949), which earnestly disclose such matters as the warmth of Liszt’s handshake or the penetration of his gaze. To be sure, Liszt’s handshake may have been the most memorable event in their lives. That is sufficient commentary on their work. Liszt, we know, was deeply perturbed by the biographical activities of his “disciples” and camp followers. He went through Janka Wohl’s copy of Trifonoff’s “François Liszt”28 (1884) with great care and made scrupulous marginal corrections, puncturing some of Trifonoff’s puffed-up prose with his sharp pen, demolishing one legend after another. Trifonoff at one point has Liszt (by then an abbé in the Roman Catholic Church) suggesting to Marie d’Agoult that they turn Protestant in order to simplify their marriage prospects. Liszt takes up his pen and writes, “No! That is not true.”29 It is easy to understand why Liszt, wearied beyond measure by such falsehoods, was often asked why he never wrote his autobiography. His ironic comment cannot be bettered: “It is enough to have lived such a life as mine.”30
In 1931 Peter Raabe (1872–1945) made the first scholarly attempt to produce order out of chaos and published his two-volume work Franz Liszt: Leben und Schaffen. Many Liszt scholars regard this book as definitive. They admire its calm detachment; Liszt’s biography had never before been unfolded so objectively. Its manner was impeccable; but what of its matter? In fact, it contained a number of flaws, the full extent of which can best be gauged by looking at the fifteen pages of corrigenda prepared by the author’s son, Felix Raabe, who brought out a second edition in 1968. Without in any way wishing to denigrate Peter Raabe’s work, one must say that his biography gave very little evidence that for thirty-four years (1910–44) he was the director of the Liszt Museum in Weimar, and had unrestricted access to its treasures; its thousands of original documents were his to do with as he willed. Yet he used them only in a passive way, to correct the errors of others. The definitive work the world had a right to expect of him, considering his key position, was not forthcoming. Unfortunately, the sources relating to Liszt’s childhood in Hungary and his youth in Paris were unknown to Raabe, and these early periods constitute the weakest sections of his book. Its most valuable feature is the great Catalogue of Works which takes up most of volume 2, and which is still a reliable guide to Liszt’s compositions.31
The year 1936 was a double anniversary: it was both the fiftieth year of Lizst’s death and the one-hundred-and-twenty-fifth year of his birth. A flurry of interest marked the event. Celebrations were mounted across the world, including in Budapest, London, and New York. Papers were read, tributes were made, music was played, lip-service was paid. A remarkable piece of information was disclosed: the complete Liszt bibliography now stood at five thousand titles.32 And yet, as the Hungarian scholar István Csekey wryly observed, despite all the activity nothing happened. All that the scholars really did during that memorial year, with one notable exception, was to rake over the old, by now familiar information in a desperate attempt to find something new to say.33 Csekey himself delivered his pioneering study The Descent and National Identity of Franz Liszt before the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 1937, and it was published by them that same year. His valuable updated genealogical tables, an indispensable guide, threw new light on Liszt’s family origins.
I mentioned an exception. In the spring and summer of 1936, Emile Haraszti (1885–1958) published his two-part essay “Liszt à Paris” in La Revue Musicale. He followed this up with his “Deux Franciscains: Adam et Franz Liszt” in 1937. A few months later came his “Le Problème Liszt” (Acta Musicologica, December 1937). Within two years, Haraszti had established himself as one of the foremost Liszt scholars of his generation. “Le Problème Liszt” is an important essay, even today. This penetrating study took a hard, critical look at the musicological mess called “Liszt scholarship,” and set about the herculean task of putting the field in order. The cunning mendacity of Ramann is censured, the simple carelessness of Raabe is exposed, and the newspapers and magazines of the day are culled for every scrap of information. Haraszti is quite splendid on matters chronological. Dates, names, and places all come up for review and correction. Hungarian by birth, Haraszti lived much of his life in France. He was by nature a “field worker” and spent his life toiling in the archives of Europe, sparing no effort to search out whatever original documentation on Liszt, however esoteric, he could find. His one-man crusade has put everyone else in his debt. He was lucky; he found cache after cache of documents, some of them (Adam Liszt’s letters to the administrators of the Paris Opéra, for example, located in that building’s archives) of importance to our understanding of Liszt’s early years. One has to deserve one’s luck, and Haraszti deserved his. And yet he has the vice of his virtues. He was rightly proud of his “sceptical” approach to Liszt. Having so drastically modified the received picture of the composer, Haraszti was occasionally carried away by his success, attempting to rob Liszt of creative achievements which were rightfully his. A good example was Liszt’s youthful opera Don Sanche, which Haraszti flatly declared to be by Liszt’s teacher Paer. The evidence is far from conclusive. A more famous example was the doubt Haraszti cast on the authenticity of Liszt’s literary output. “Liszt never wrote anything but his private letters,” Haraszti declared.34 He was convinced that all Liszt’s books and articles (contained in the Gesammelte Schriften) were a fraud. The works of the 1830s, he said, particularly the Lettres d’un bachelier-ès-musique, came from the pen of Marie d’Agoult, while those of the 1850s, including Chopin and Des Bohémiens et leur musique en Hongrie, were written by Princess von Sayn-Wittgenstein. Liszt, in short, merely allowed these ladies to use his name. A careful reading of Haraszti compels us to say that he was forced to extend the evidence in order to reach so extreme a conclusion. It had been known, almost from the beginning, that Liszt sought literary collaboration from his two mistresses. Liszt himself furnished us with circumstantial evidence of that fact. (Incidentally, none of the holographs for the Lettres can be found.) Thus, after the initial success of the first group of Bachelor of Music essays, we find him writing to Marie d’Agoult in Nohant: “When I arrive at Nohant I shall ask you for one or two articles.”35 The essay to George Sand (“Lettre à un poète voyageur”) he even referred to as “ours.” Shortly afterwards he sent Marie the outline of an article about some chamber-music recitals he had recently given with Batta and Urhan. “Here is an outline of the article, which does not have to be too long.… The article ought to be written in my personal name. This is an important matter for me. I am asking you for a real service. Try to let me have it within five or six days so that I can have it printed in the Gazette on Sunday, February 26, and also in Le Monde.”36 By 1839 Liszt was having second thoughts about the wisdom of leaving so much literary responsibility to others. He wrote to Marie from Vienna: “Do not publish anything in the future on my behalf, either in the Gazette or elsewhere.”37 Nonetheless, in 1847 we find Liszt asking Marie to provide a preface for his forthcoming volume of Hungarian Rhapsodies.38 The idea came to nothing for the simple reason that their relationship was now almost ended. In 1848 Liszt moved to Weimar and installed himself in the Altenburg with his second mistress, Princess von Sayn-Wittgenstein. Peter Cornelius, his secretary and translator during the early 1850s, has left us a harrowing picture in his diary of the way in which the princess meddled in Liszt’s literary activities. One famous example was the essay on Wagner’s Das Rheingold. Cornelius had translated the princess’s French manuscript into German. Liszt then revised the text. “Then everything was turned upside down, which pained me no end.” After this procedure had been repeated no fewer than four times, poor Cornelius was almost beside himself. “I thought this thing would drive me crazy,” he wrote.39
All this is compelling testimony in favour of those who would have us believe that Liszt’s literary output is a gigantic deception. Yet there is another side to this complex story. In the British Library there exists a detailed twelve-page holograph, a draft of one part of Liszt’s early article “On the Position of Artists” (1835) signed by Liszt.40 Preserved at Weimar is the holograph of Liszt’s closely argued preface to his Symphonic Poems;41 and in the same archive we also find a holograph sketch of his essay “De la fondation Goethe à Weimar” (1850). The existence of these important documents goes some way towards restoring Liszt’s credentials as an author. Certainly it demolishes Haraszti’s statement that “Liszt never wrote anything.” An important question is now raised. Is there any evidence that Liszt’s other published articles were originally printed from holographs? The Pariser Zeitung of October 2, 1838, observing the emergence of Liszt as a writer in the columns of Schlesinger’s Revue et Gazette Musicale, voiced the suspicion that Madame d’Agoult was the true author—whereupon Schlesinger at once published an invitation to anyone who cared to do so to call at the offices of the Gazette and scrutinize the originals for himself. Schlesinger would hardly have done this unless he had something to show to his callers.42 Sometime after 1838 these manuscripts vanished. Liszt himself was puzzled by their disappearance. Years afterwards, when the question of producing a collected edition of his writings arose, their whereabouts became a topical issue.
What has become of the original French manuscripts of my complete articles I don’t in the least know.… The only person who could give some particulars would be Mlle L. Ramann, my biographer, who has been for many years past on the lookout for everything related to my prose and music.43
Liszt does not say here that the manuscripts were in his handwriting, but he does refer explicitly to “my articles.” Elsewhere he directly claims authorship for certain essays: the first four pieces he undertook for the Gazette he described unequivocally as “by me.”44 Even if the original manuscripts were one day to come to light, however, and some of them bore the telltale calligraphy of Marie d’Agoult or Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, what would that prove? In this day and age, when great men “write” their memoirs by the simple expedient of dictating their thoughts into a microphone, the recording later to be transcribed and edited by other hands, we have a far broader conception of “authorship” than the one which would confine it to the mere act of pushing a pen across a sheet of paper. What seems to have happened in Liszt’s case is that he provided all the ideas, especially the musical ones (neither Marie nor Carolyne was professionally competent to talk about music45), and then his thoughts were put into a polished literary form. Not the least remarkable aspect of the situation is that both of Liszt’s mistress-writers seemed content to work in obscurity. Indeed, when asked about the authorship of the Chopin book, Carolyne replied unhelpfully: “When two beings become completely merged, can it ever be said where the work of one begins or of the other ends?”46
Where does this leave the problem? Today, as Serge Gut has pointed out, there are four positions that can logically be taken with regards to Liszt’s literary output: (a) none of it is by him; (b) some of it is by him; (c) most of it is by him; (d) all of it is by him.47 No Liszt scholar would now accept the two extremes of either (a) or (d). The evidence obliges him to occupy the middle ground; but just which part of that middle ground he chooses to take, (b) or (c), will depend largely on how he interprets the facts. From this vexed topic only one conclusion can safely be drawn: each article poses a separate problem and demands a separate conclusion. For the rest, whenever the hand of Marie d’Agoult or Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein reveals itself (as, for example, in the notorious Bachelor essay on La Scala, which caused Liszt embarrassment and is beyond question the work of d’Agoult; see p. 264) we shall draw attention to it. Adolphe Boschot was witty but not entirely wise when he remarked, “Le style, c’est la femme!”48
No survey of the Liszt literature would be entirely complete without passing reference to the scandal-mongers and myth-makers. Liszt’s charisma is such that he has attracted more speculation over his amours, both real and imagined, than any other composer in history. A whole mythology has sprung up concerning the illegitimate progeny he is supposed to have scattered across Europe. The desire to saddle great men with illicit offspring is not new. What is new is the persistence with which such efforts have been directed towards Liszt for the past one hundred years. If only half these tales were true, Liszt would have had no time for composition, no time for piano playing, no time for anything other than the fulfillment of this mundane destiny the myth-makers have carved out for him, and there would consequently be no reason to write a biography of him at all. It is necessary to review this literature not because it is important or true, for it is neither, but because it represents a psychological, phenomenon without parallel in the annals of musical biography.
Typical of the field is the case of Ilona Höhnel, who lived in Weimar until 1963 and was known locally as “the last daughter of Liszt.” Her mother was the beautiful Ilona von Kovacsics, the daughter of a Hungarian couple whom Liszt knew well and often visited in their home in Weimar during the 1880s. This young girl, so the story goes, fell deeply in love with the great pianist, who was by then an abbé. Since the relationship soon produced a consequence, the influential parents arranged a marriage for their daughter with a certain Herr Falz. After the birth of the child on August 6, 1882, in Bad Reichenhall, the marriage was dissolved. This child, a daughter, was christened Ilona after her mother. Ilona Falz was highly musical and became a respected piano teacher in Weimar. In 1907 she married a Weimar hairdresser called Höhnel. Her last years were clouded by misfortune. During the closing days of the Second World War, in the spring of 1945, she was run over in a Weimar street by a Russian military vehicle and crippled. For the rest of her life she hobbled on crutches, and she became destitute. A report appeared in the Hamburger Abendblatt in January 1961 calling attention to her plight. “Almost helpless, she depends on the support of her neighbours and on her Social Security allowance of 85 Ostmark. But even today, in old age, her resemblance to her father is so great that this alone would be enough proof of her identity.” Where is the documentary evidence for such a tale? It does not exist. There is not a shred of proof to demonstrate Liszt’s connection with this unfortunate woman. Yet there are still people in Weimar who believe it, as witness the death mask taken by Professor Günther Kraft and introduced by him as “evidence” of Frau Höhnel’s lineage when he pursued this thesis in a lecture delivered in Bayreuth in 1964. We would do better to look up the dates. Ilona von Kovacsics gave birth to her daughter in early August 1882; she therefore conceived in November 1881. Liszt at that time was a thousand miles away; from October to December 1881 he lived in Rome, and although we have a mass of information about the people he met during these four months, the name of Fräulein von Kovacsics is nowhere to be found. So seductive was the pull of the legend, however, that when Ilona Höhnel died in Weimar on January 24, 1963, those responsible for her burial (she had no living relatives) engraved on her tombstone the epigraph: “Franz Liszts Tochter.”49
Then there is the strange case of Dr. Carlos Davila. He was the founder of the faculty of medicine in Bucharest, became an army doctor, rose to the rank of general, and held several distinguished positions in Rumania. Davila was said to be born around 1832. His childhood was cloaked in mystery, and the circumstances surrounding the place and date of his birth remain obscure. It therefore became a matter of urgency for the Rumanians to provide this impressive figure with a suitable pedigree. For no other reasons, apparently, than his strong facial resemblance to Liszt and the keen interest shown in Dr. Davila’s career by a number of people in Liszt’s circle, and the fact that he paid a visit to Liszt in Weimar in the early 1850s, which is shrouded in mystery, the rumour began to circulate in Rumania that Davila was the natural son of Liszt. It soon reached the capitals of Vienna and Paris via the diplomatic network (Davila maintained contacts with aristocrats and politicians in France and the Austro-Hungarian empire) and became established as fact. No authentic documents were ever produced to substantiate this absurd assertion, but it has haunted the Liszt literature until modern times. In 1956 there appeared a book, Davila: Fils de Liszt? by Doretta Berthoud, which devoted nearly three hundred pages to the pursuit of the barren hypothesis that Davila was a hitherto unrecognized offspring of Marie d’Agoult and Liszt. This story was “substantiated” by such witnesses as Madame Claire de Charnacé (Marie’s legitimate daughter by Charles d’Agoult) and King Carol I of Rumania. When the inquiring reader turns the page he discovers that these “witnesses” are merely cited by other people twice and thrice removed, rendering it impossible to nail down a single verifiable fact. The day after Davila died in 1884, L’Indépendance roumaine published an obituary notice which archly referred to him as the offspring of two superior creatures “whose names we all know.” That is considerably more than the rest of the world has ever been able to discover, and although a century has meanwhile passed, we are no nearer to establishing Davila’s true identity than we ever were.
Equally bogus was the assertion that the pianist and composer Franz Servais had a claim on Liszt’s paternity. This case was sensationalized by Ernest Newman in his foolish character assassination of Liszt.50 Newman set out to show that Servais was the natural son of Liszt and Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, and he gleefully reminded his readers that it was “common talk” in Weimar that Servais was one of Liszt’s sons; that this young man bore a close resemblance both to Liszt and to his deceased son, Daniel; that he possessed an outstanding musical talent; that he was christened Franz; that after the death of his adoptive father, Adrien Servais, he was taken under Liszt’s wing (at the request of Madame Servais), who promoted his career; and, finally, that he was born in St. Petersburg in 1847, the very year that Liszt got to know Carolyne. Newman’s case collapses the moment we examine the dates. Liszt first met Carolyne in Kiev in February 1847; she did indeed journey to St. Petersburg in 1847—for two months during March and April. Whatever the reason for her trip, then, it was clearly not to produce Liszt’s child. This did not stop Grove V51 from referring to the rumour, and it was actually reported as bald fact in Baker V (“He was an illegitimate son of Liszt and Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein”), a neat example of biographical work run wild.52 Liszt, of course, heard the wagging tongues in Weimar during the ’sixties and ’seventies. According to Richard Burmeister, Liszt was once asked during a game of whist if he was indeed the father of Servais. His amusing reply cannot be bettered: “Ich kenne seine Mutter nur durch Correspondenz, und so was kann nicht durch Correspondenz abmachen” (“I know his mother only through correspondence, and one can’t arrange that sort of thing by correspondence”). The truly fascinating thing about all these cases—Davila, Ilona Höhnel, and Franz Servais—is that their claims were invariably made for them, never by them. The whole topic is pathological: the creators of such tales have themselves become an object worthy of study.
Even Liszt’s most respected colleagues were not above spreading gossip about his personal affairs in general, and about the consequences of his union with Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein in particular. For twelve years (1848–60) Liszt and Carolyne lived under the same roof in Weimar. Their liaison caused much controversy in the small town. Since they produced no children, it became necessary for the upright citizens of Weimar to invent them. According to Carl Maria Cornelius, Carolyne bore Liszt three children and removed herself from Weimar on each occasion for the confinement.53 We are to conclude that Cornelius received this information directly from his father, Peter Cornelius, who lived in Weimar during the 1850s, was Liszt’s secretary and trusted colleague, and was in a position to observe events at first hand. The source appears to be unassailable, and the story has gained credence among Liszt scholars. Unfortunately, Carl Maria was only six years old when his father died in 1874. It cannot be stressed sufficiently that he provided no evidence for his assertion. He simply assumed that his readers would believe him by virtue of his father’s close professional association with Liszt during the years in question. Argumentum ad verecundiam. Moreover, his book was not published until 1925, so Liszt and Carolyne could not deny the statement. One central fact tells against Cornelius: the passionate attachment of Carolyne to Liszt, which would never have allowed her to give up her children by him, let alone hide them away in a foreign city. Likewise, it would be uncharacteristic of Liszt to aid and abet her in such a covert act. He had openly acknowledged paternity of his three children by Countess Marie d’Agoult (Blandine, Cosima, and Daniel, the only children of Liszt we know of), was proud to give them his name, and fought to have them legitimized in 1845 after his rupture with the countess was complete. He would have behaved no less honourably towards any children of his by Carolyne, the more so since it was his declared wish at this time to marry her.54 Unless more evidence is forthcoming, Carl Maria Cornelius, too, must be consigned to the scrap heap of innuendo and gossip.
And what of Liszt today? Books and articles about him abound. The latest bibliographic count puts the total number of Liszt titles at over ten thousand. It would be arrogant of anyone to claim familiarity with them all. But the conscientious Liszt biographer surely has a duty to try. The task confronting him is formidable. For not only must he come to terms with the literature itself; he must understand its history, understand why some of it came to be written at all. He must also familiarize himself with the large quantities of unpublished material still awaiting scrutiny in the archives of Europe and North America. The main centres of original Liszt research today are Weimar, Budapest, and Washington, D.C., with important archives in Rome and Paris. Still other archives will doubtless one day come to light in Russia, a country which Liszt visited three times and with which he maintained lifelong links. One of the more important original sources, practically unknown to Liszt scholars, is the great Esterházy Archive in Budapest. The incalculable treasures in this massive collection have not even been properly catalogued. Hundreds of documents pertaining to Liszt’s family were transferred to the National Széchényi Library after World War II, as part of the series now known as Acta Musicalia. These documents were examined afresh by the Hungarian scholar Arisztid Valkó, whose studies have altered our conception of Liszt’s early childhood and his family background.55 The archive contains a vast correspondence between Prince Nicholas Esterházy on the one hand and Liszt’s grandfather Georg and his father, Adam, on the other. No one who sifts through this material will be in much doubt about the hardship and privation endured by this family, and about the self-sacrifices Adam made in order to smooth the path for his prodigy son. No musical genius could have been born into more difficult circumstances. The archive is embarrassingly rich in the minutiae of the Liszts’ daily life, ranging from the revelation that grandfather Liszt got into trouble with Prince Esterházy for his unauthorized use of the manorial horse and cart in order to drive his young wife to the Vienna Prater, to the touching documents which disclose that Liszt made a nostalgic bid to purchase the humble cottage in Raiding where he was born. Of such stuff as this are biographies made. I have drawn heavily on this material for my discussion of Liszt’s family background in the second half of this prologue.
A final, cautionary word. Only those scholars who have attempted to traverse the whole of this enormous field will appreciate the gaps still waiting to be filled. To identify a few at random: The correspondence between Adam and Anna Liszt during their years of separation (1824–27) has still not come to light. Presumably it perished in flames, along with other valuable family documents belonging to Anna, when the home of Emile Ollivier, her politician grandson-in-law, was burned down during the Paris Commune uprising of 1871. Liszt’s second will, made shortly before his death, is still missing. So too is Adam Liszt’s diary, which contained much information about Liszt’s childhood. And the Vatican Library remains innocent of all knowledge about any documents in its possession which might throw light on the joint machinations of the church and the Wittgenstein family in Russia, an unholy alliance which was powerful enough to stop Liszt’s marriage to Princess Carolyne twelve hours before the ceremony was due to take place in Rome, on October 22, 1861. As for all the unpublished peripheral material which has recently become available, but still awaits investigation by the intrepid scholar with limitless time and boundless energy, we may cite in passing the vast Ramann-Wittgenstein correspondence in the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, which was placed under a fifty-year embargo after Ramann’s death in 1912 because of its “sensitive” material. Into a similar category fall the more than fifteen hundred handwritten missives with which Princess von Sayn-Wittgenstein bombarded the Russian ambassador to Weimar during the 1850s in connection with her divorce case, some of which are two hundred pages long, and which are now held in the Grand Ducal Archives, Weimar. Such material represents but one small corner of the quagmire through which the Liszt biographer wanders at his peril. Just how much information from such sources, once excavated, can usefully be incorporated into a biographical narrative before that narrative sinks beneath the weight of its own learning remains forever a matter of personal judgement. For the biographer has a responsibility towards his reader: namely, to address him. He should heed Voltaire’s aphorism: “If you would be dull, tell all.”
While my life of Liszt may not “tell all,” it has nonetheless been impossible to compress it into fewer than three volumes.
I The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847
II The Weimar Years, 1848–1861
III The Final Years: “Une Vie Trifurquée,” 1861–1886
It arose from a conviction, based on many years of study of the man and his music, together with a close investigation of the literature, that Liszt was the central figure in the Romantic century (Berlioz and Wagner notwithstanding) and that a book was needed to proclaim that fact. The present state of Liszt biography, particularly in the English-speaking world, reflects a sort of Gresham’s Law whereby the constant recapitulation of the same events leads only to the most sensational details being recalled. It was high time to redress the balance. Every biographer of Liszt so far has attempted the impossible: he has tried to understand the man without knowing anything about the child. This is an elementary blunder, quite impossible to justify. A man’s life does not begin when he is twenty; there is a deep and profound sense in which that life is by then already ended. Volume I, therefore, covers Liszt’s family background, his early childhood, and his adolescence in Paris in much greater detail than hitherto. It was a peculiarly difficult book to handle because the sources are so widely scattered, and it took a decade to write. Although the process is long and laborious, the wisdom of taking nothing on trust as far as Liszt is concerned, of consulting original documents whenever possible, particularly when they have a direct bearing on his life, is vindicated in a hundred different ways. The last thing that Liszt needs at this stage of his posthumous career is yet another biography which merely consists of two or three old ones joined together. A great deal of fresh information has been incorporated into the present study, and I make no apology for the rather large number of citations, both primary and secondary, which bolsters the narrative along the way. Given the confused history of Liszt biography hitherto, no other aims seemed worthy.
1. WA, Kasten 351, no. 1; unpublished.
2. LLB, vol. 7, p. 181.
3. This study was spotted almost at once by Robert Schumann, who commissioned a complete German translation for his magazine, the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik. D’Ortigue’s piece was therefore transmitted across the whole of Germany. The work of translation was carried out by Emil Flechsig (1808–78), and it was published in six instalments (NZfM, vol. 4, nos. 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 10, 1836).
4. Carl Engel published a list of these annotations in his useful review of the Washington copy called “Views and Reviews,” MQLN, July 1936.
5. These, of course, represent by no means all the writings about Liszt during the first thirty years of his life. He was the topic of constant comment in the European press; the professional journals, especially the ones published in France and Germany, often carry long reports about his activities. Among the more interesting are the Musikalische Berichte aus Paris (1841), written by Heine, articles by Berlioz in the Journal des Débats, and Robert Schumann’s classic pieces on Liszt’s Leipzig concerts in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (1840).
As for the many newspaper reports from other lands, they are to be found in practically every country through which Liszt toured. They are often set pieces which merely unroll the same tired biographical information, not unlike the press handouts artists still carry around with them today, whose function is largely cosmetic. Two stimulating exceptions are Bohemia and Buda-Pesti Rajzolatok, newspapers which served the Slovak and Hungarian-speaking populations of Eastern Europe, respectively. Their accounts of the pianist’s visits to Prague (1840) and Pest (1839–40) are highly rewarding to the serious Liszt researcher.
6. In two volumes (Brussels, 1846). The following year it also appeared in a Spanish translation (Burgos, 1847).
7. HL, p. 259. The details are given in Volume Three, pp. 177–79.
8. LLM, pp. 207–8.
9. For an account of Ramann herself, consult the useful biographical sketch by Marie Ille-Beeg in IRL.
10. Die Musik als Gegenstand der Erziehung (1868), and Allgemeine Erzieh- und Unterrichtslehre der Jugend (1869).
11. RL, p. 131.
12. The dramatic story of how Ollivier came into possession of these priceless letters is worth telling, since it shows how shifting are the foundations on which biography rests. Marie d’Agoult bequeathed all her papers to Louis de Ronchaud, her literary executor, who was at her bedside when she died in 1876. Ronchaud, the director of the Louvre, lived in bachelor apartments in the Louvre itself. When he died in 1887 one of his female relatives gained admittance to his rooms and systematically began to burn bundles of papers in the fireplace. Portions of the d’Agoult legacy had already been consigned to the flames when a young assistant director, Georges Lafenestre, walked in and stopped her from completing this senseless act of vandalism. The bundles which were saved, including the Liszt-d’Agoult Correspondance, were entrusted to Marie’s heirs and eventually passed to her grandson Daniel Ollivier. Today these holographs are in the Bibliothèque Nationale (NAF Archives Daniel Ollivier no. 25179). In 1927 Ollivier published Madame d’Agoult’s Mémoires, constructed from a loose assemblage of her papers. Such was the interest aroused by this book that he followed it some six years later with the two volumes of Correspondance. For many years the world assumed that Ollivier had published all the letters in his possession, and, more important, had published them complete. It is now apparent that this was not the case. What the world requires, in fact, is a completely new edition of the Liszt-d’Agoult Correspondance which will restore the material omitted by Ollivier.
13. Between the years 1874 and 1881, while Ramann was preparing her biography, it became her habit to send Liszt handwritten questionnaires with spaces beneath each question for his reply. These holographs are all preserved in the Weimar archives (WA, Kasten 351, no. 1). Ramann put more than one hundred questions to Liszt about his life and work, and his replies are often detailed. In sifting through these documents, which seem to be unknown to Liszt’s biographers, the modern observer is struck with great force by two things. First: however painful the question, Liszt does not shirk the answer; we know this with certainty because his replies can today be objectively verified, and they reveal Liszt to be a truth-teller of an unusual order. Second: the relationship between Ramann and Liszt was as detached as that between a lawyer and his client. The charge of collusion must be discounted. On one occasion Liszt balks at one of Ramann’s questions. She asks him to provide details about the death of his son, Daniel. The subject is apparently too sensitive for him to deal with in writing, and he replies that the matter ought to be handled orally the next time that they meet. Closely related to these questionnaires is the extant correspondence between Ramann and Liszt, the main body of which consists of a series of twenty-nine letters which are in reality amplifications of, or supplements to, his autobiographical responses to Ramann’s questions (WA, Kasten 326). It is from the correspondence, in fact, that we receive proof that Liszt granted Ramann personal interviews. On August 30, 1874, shortly after she began work on her biography, he wrote, “Before the first volume appears I am available for a few hours’ conference—next May or June in Weimar or Nuremberg” (where Ramann lived). These questionnaires are included in Lisztiana (1983). See RL, pp. 387–408.
14. See VAMA and VFL.
15. LDML.
16. The holograph, dated June 1824, is now in the British Library, M.S. Add. 33965.
17. Letter to Franz von Schober, December 5, 1840, LLB, vol. 1, p. 41.
18. Letter to Theodor Uhlig, June 25, 1851, LLB, vol. 1, p. 99.
19. Letter to Joachim, March 28, 1854, MBJ, vol. 1, p. 179.
20. Letter to Hans von Bülow, March 27, 1855, LBLB, p. 128.
21. PBUS.
22. WLLM.
23. SLAB.
24. For example, there are several hundred unpublished letters between Liszt and his three children and Liszt and his mother in the Nationalarchiv der Richard-Wagner-Stiftung in Bayreuth, while the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar holds thousands of unpublished letters to or from Liszt, or letters written by third parties about him. One need only mention the nearly two thousand unpublished letters to Liszt from Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein (to which vols. 4–7 of Liszts Briefe form the published counterpart) to appreciate the size of the legacy.
25. HFLA and HPL, p. 130.
26. See pp. 20–23.
27. “Strelezki” was an Englishman. His real name was Burnand (1859–1907), and he was born in Croydon.
28. TL.
29. WFLR, p. 61. See also LLB, vol. 8, p. 377.
30. WFLR, p. 88. Another publication can be mentioned here. In 1853, Liszt had been sent a copy of the biographical article about him that had appeared in the Konversations-Lexikon, published by Brockhaus. Again the errors were stupid, but Liszt handled them with exemplary detachment. He pointed out that he had never worn the bleu-barbot coat of the St. Simonists, that he had never been to America, and that while he did not object to being called the “Paganini of the piano,” it would be nice to think that his more recent work might make its way because of his own name and gain for him a worthier mention in any future edition of the Lexikon. This reply was extremely dignified, if one bears in mind that the article had referred to the “poverty of invention” of his music. (LLB, vol. 1, pp. 162–64.)
31. Liszt composed more than thirteen hundred individual pieces of music. They were gathered up by Raabe under 674 catalogue entries. His catalogue formed the basis of the one prepared by Humphrey Searle for Grove V (1954), revised and updated by him for The New Grove (1980). The original sources for Raabe’s catalogue are: (1) two thematic catalogues prepared and published by Liszt himself in 1855 and 1877, respectively; (2) a manuscript catalogue prepared by Princess von Sayn-Wittgenstein; (3) a manuscript list of the repertory played by Liszt on his concert tours, 1838–48. Neither Raabe nor Searle is free from error, and when they refer to the locations of manuscripts (and particularly to the ones in private hands, many of which have long since found their way into other collections) we do well to proceed with caution.
32. KLV.
33. One achievement rightly belongs to 1936, although it passed almost unnoticed. More by accident than by design, the vast thirty-four-volume Collected Edition of Liszt’s music, begun in 1907, was finally brought to completion. This great enterprise, thirty or so years in the making, was handled by Breitkopf and Härtel under the distinguished editorship of Busoni, Bartók, Vianna da Motta, Raabe, and others.
34. HPL, p. 130. Haraszti’s views were summed up in his article “Franz Liszt: Author Despite Himself.” (HFLA.)
35. ACLA, vol. 1, p. 189.
36. ACLA, vol. 1, p. 195.
37. ACLA, vol. 1, p. 329.
38. ACLA, vol. 2, p. 389.
39. CAB, vol. 1, pp. 187–88.
40. M.S. Add. 33965, fol. 237–42.
41. WA, Kasten 5, no. 1.
42. Liszt’s unpublished letters to Maurice Schlesinger refer to the Bachelor essays and imply that they are his own. In a letter dated “Frankfurt, September 8, 1841,” Liszt writes: “Have the Bachelier carefully corrected by Mormais and let the varied fragments from Hamburg, Copenhagen, Luxhaven, and Nonnenwerth be separated by dotted lines, or any type of line of separation as I’ve indicated.” (WA, Kasten 73, no. 6.) Although the particular Bachelor essay to which Liszt here refers was never published (what became of it?), he clearly took a close interest in the layout of the printed page—an indication of his personal involvement in these travelogues.
43. LLB, vol. 2, p. 330.
44. LLBM, p. 24.
45. To this statement, however, should be added the little-known fact that Marie d’Agoult was a fairly accomplished amateur pianist, and Liszt praised her playing in the early days of their liaison. In 1833, for example, we find him telling Henri Herz that Marie had “taken up the piano again,” that she was working on his (Herz’s) Variations on Euryanthe, and that she had made “immense progress.” (ACLA, vol. 1, p. 35.) But this would hardly qualify Marie to have written the Bachelor essays unaided.
46. MAL, p. 168.
47. GLEL, p. 38.
48. BMP, p. 152.
49. The grave lies in the Stadtfriedhof, Weimar. Had Günther Kraft prepared his lecture with greater care, he would have examined the tombstone before making his pronouncements. This would have enabled him to get Frau Höhnel’s birthdate right, to say nothing of her mother’s maiden name. She is buried with her grandmother Marie Kovacsics (1837–1919).
50. NML, p. 182ff.
51. Vol. 7. p. 719.
52. The New Grove (1980) has also fallen victim to this falsehood, thereby perpetuating its life for at least one more generation. (Vol. 17, p. 188.)
53. CPC, vol. 1, p. 158.
54. LLB, vol. 5, p. 53.
55. VLC.