Important developments have taken place in the world of Liszt scholarship since this volume first went to press, in 1983. Most noteworthy is the belated publication of Lina Ramann’s Lisztiana.1 This book contains many of the basic documents Ramann used to construct her “official” three-volume biography of Liszt, which appeared during the fourteen-year period 1880–94. It had always been known that Liszt granted Ramann some personal interviews, but their extent had never before been properly chronicled. Moreover, she struck up a long correspondence with Liszt and various members of his circle, and she gradually acquired a mass of detailed information about him of a type never before assembled. Nonetheless, her biography was dismissed as mere hagiography because parts of it were thought (not without justification) to have been written by Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, Liszt’s mistress and companion. We now know differently. Ramann herself was partly to blame for the problem. Because of the “sensitive” nature of much of the material, she placed an embargo on its use by others and left instructions that her archives could not be opened until fifty years after her death. Meanwhile, all her papers were transferred to the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv in Weimar, where they were known to only a small handful of scholars. With the publication of Lisztiana in 1983, all that has changed. Ramann’s place in the hierarchy of Liszt scholars will have to be reassessed.
Then there was the reappearance of Beethoven’s Conversation Books for the period February–July 1823, in a new and thoroughly reliable edition,2 which raised afresh the vexed question of Schindler’s forged entries and how they might affect the only recorded meeting between the master and the eleven-year-old Liszt in Vienna, in April 1823. The simple answer is that they do not. Some new perspectives must nonetheless be considered, for Schindler’s spurious additions have been wrongly assumed to discredit the entire Liszt-Beethoven connection.
Finally, the year 1986 saw the centenary of Liszt’s death, with commemorative festivals all over the world. Some of these events were significant, particularly the ones mounted in Budapest, Paris, and Washington, for they brought together an international cast of scholars, some of whom toil on the leading edge of the discipline. Liszt’s piano playing, his composing methods, and his religious convictions all came under fresh scrutiny, to say nothing of such esoteric issues as his health, the size of his bank balance, and the watermarks on his stationery. All things are grist to the biographer’s mill. One of the unexpected pleasures of the Liszt jubilee year, in fact, was the discovery that the art of iconography has made such rapid strides of late that it has been raised to the level of a research tool. What a man wears as he comports himself before the camera, it seems, can occasionally yield as much biographical information as a letter or a diary entry. The best collection of Liszt photographs to appear in recent times is Ernst Burger’s Franz Liszt: Eine Lebenschronik in Bildern und Dokumenten, which has changed the existing chronology of a number of well-known paintings and lithographs.
In view of these and other developments, it seemed to me that nothing short of a revised text would do if the present volume were to continue to meet the requirements of modern scholarship. Two people in particular encouraged me in this task. Mária Eckhardt, the director of the Liszt Memorial Museum and Research Centre in Budapest, made many helpful suggestions, and the time we spent together in the City of the Magyars, working on the text of the Hungarian edition of this book in the summer of 1985, remains a pleasant memory for me. But it was Geraldine Keeling who persuaded me to look afresh at Liszt’s concerts, and in particular at the great tours of Europe he undertook from 1838 to 1847, with a view to providing the reader with more detail than I had originally considered to be either desirable or necessary. My inertia was overcome by her winning combination of charm, tact, and practical advice. The sort of help I received from both scholars is beyond praise, and it is a pleasure to acknowledge it here.
It has been well said that it takes a life to study a life. As the modern Liszt biographer proceeds along his journey, he does well to carry with him both a mirror and a lamp—the one to reflect more accurately the changing landscape that now surrounds him, the other to illuminate the dark paths that still lie ahead. Only then may he be sure that his work remains worthy of its topic.
Rome, June 1987
ALAN WALKER