Musical Trailblazers 2 - Lisztomania
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David Hackett29. July 2023
Long before Justin Bieber, Tom Jones, the Beatles or Frank Sinatra, there was Franz Liszt.
He has often been dubbed history’s First Rock Star, even if he was not quite the first to send his audiences into a delirious hysteria: several before him could equally have claimed such a honour. But Liszt certainly took things to a whole new level, lending his name to an astonishing pan-European craze of the 1840s: Lisztomania.
The Hungarian-born virtuoso never set out to be a celebrity or international heartthrob. To begin with he simply wanted to excel as one of the best pianists of his generation. Under the guidance of his father Adam, a professional musician, the young Franz made such rapid progress that he was giving professional recitals by the time he was nine years old. Such was his early accomplishments that one contemporary wrote “I am convinced that the soul and spirit of Mozart have passed into the body of young Liszt.”
As a teenager, he fearlessly tackled some of the most difficult piano music of the day, including the sonatas of Beethoven and the concertos of Hummel. Already possessing a powerful technique and showing little inclination to hold back on dramatic passages, he would leave behind a trail of destruction on the various pianos he got to play on: a frequent occurrence at a Liszt recital was performer and audience sitting by patiently while a piano tuner was called to repair some broken strings. Later on, such breakages would become part of the whole Lisztian package, with a replacement piano usually sitting by during each concert. Rather like 1970s rock stars smashing their guitars on stage, Liszt would leave his audience disappointed if he hadn’t managed to inflict some instrumental damage over the course of the evening.
Liszt’s path to performer extraordinaire certainly wasn’t a linear one. When his father suddenly died of typhoid in 1827, he was still only 16, and without his father’s direction he gave up performing for five years. He instead moved to Paris with his mother, taking modest accommodation and making a living from giving piano lessons. For a time he even flirted with taking holy orders.
Having gradually made himself known among the musical elite of the day, he became friends with Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Wagner and the Schumanns, Robert and Clara (Clara being herself a rival pianist). By now a handsome, well-groomed young man, Liszt moved in the right circles, and began to date some beautiful aristocratic women, including Caroline de Saint Cricq (the daughter of the king’s minister of commerce) and the countess Marie d’Agoult (with whom he would have three children though never marry).
But it was only after attending a charity concert given by Paganini that Liszt felt inspired to become the pianistic equivalent of the great violin virtuoso. In 1839, on the proviso that he was raising funds for a Beethoven memorial in Bonn, he set off on a tour of Vienna and Hungary, and then simply didn’t stop, spending much of the next eight years on the road, giving concerts all over the continent, ranging from Spain to Russia. It was these next eight years that would cement his popular reputation in history, and although he generously gave away many of his performing fees to charity and humanitarian causes, he still earned enough of a fortune to leave him comfortably set up for the rest of his life.
The effect of his concerts was almost indescribable. Rather like Paganini, Liszt was tall and very thin, with an unusually long mane of hair highlighting his soft, almost androgynous features. At the piano he could be a Titan, showing great reserves of strength, of speed, or superlative technique, while also displaying a much more tender side through the lyricism and sensitivity of his playing.
But Liszt had also learned something from Paganini about engaging intimately with his audience. He was, for example, one of the very first pianists to play entire concerts without sheet music. Having imperiously walked onto the stage, he would sit at right angles to the audience (in a way not at all common for the time), as if positively inviting them to gaze at and admire his fine profile, his majestic physical gestures, and his thick locks of hair swirling from side to side.
He rarely played to a set programme. Instead, he would gauge his audience’s mood and adjust his repertoire accordingly, a repertoire usually made up of his own compositions, although he would often add pieces from the classics, filling them with suitably virtuosic embellishments. He would coin the term “recital” for his performances, having originally billeted them as “musical soliloquys.”
Liszt seldom prepared meticulously for his concerts, usually preferring to go with the moment. If he had a recital at noon, he would be rolling out of bed at 11.30 after a busy night. As his celebrity rocketed during these years, he would come to live a distinctly high-spirited existence off the concert stage, drinking, partying, womanizing and once (according to his friend Berlioz) almost getting into a duel with a passing stranger.
Although his performances were generally heard in rapt silence, it was only after he had played the final notes that the mayhem would begin. For those female fans who were still conscious, this was the time when they would quite literally throw themselves (as well as their undergarments) at him. Others would grab at his clothes, hoping to steal a handkerchief or a silk scarf, or try to snip locks off his hair.
Even the dregs of coffee cups or discarded cigarettes could become personal shrines for his most obsessive followers. One woman was said to have grabbed one of Liszt’s used cigar butts, before having it encased in an expensive locket with the initials FL inscribed in diamonds. She wore it everywhere she went, even as the locket started to smell.
There are countless records of the amorous emotions that Liszt could arouse. When Balzac’s mistress (and future wife) Eva Hanska had the opportunity to meet the pianist in the flesh she positively fawned over him. “His eyes are glassy, but they light up under the effect of his wit and sparkle like the facets of a cut diamond,” she wrote dreamily in her diary that night. Every part of him “makes heaven dream”.
Liszt was fully aware of his effect on women and sometimes employed safeguards, not least during his numerous one-night stands. When once sleeping with Lola Montez, a famous erotic-dancer in her day, he sneaked out during the night, sufficiently enraging Lola that she trashed the hotel room the next morning. Knowing her reputation beforehand, Liszt had already covered for such an eventuality, having left a sum of money for the hotel proprietors on his departure.
But while he could move women to amorous hysteria, men were not immune to Liszt’s extraordinary charisma. He could make serious music critics cry with emotion after a performance. When the Danish fairy-tale writer Hans Christian Andersen attended a recital he afterwards recalled the pianist’s amazing presence, “When Liszt entered the saloon, it was as if an electric shock passed through it … as if a ray of sunlight passed over every face.”
Kings and Tsars adored him. When once leaving Germany after a triumphant tour, the local monarch organized a full-on royal procession of thirty royal coaches and six white horses to escort Liszt on his way. On another occasion in St Petersburg, Liszt publicly ticked off Tsar Nicholas I of Russia for chatting while he was playing. Such was his status that he travelled around with a passport that simply read, “Celebritate sua sat notus” - sufficiently known for his celebrity.
In all, Liszt’s effect on his listeners was more than a passing craze. More serious observers likened it to an illness. It was after hearing Liszt perform in 1844 and noting the hysterical, screaming audience, that the German poet Heinrich Heine coined the term: Lisztomania. But the “mania” part was not intended to denote intense emotion or a simple fashion craze in the way we might regard certain celebrated performers today. Many in the medical profession believed it to be an actual sickness, even if they could not exactly pinpoint its cause. Heine himself thought it belonged to the “domain of pathology, rather than that of aesthetics” or even as “veritable insanity, one unheard of in the annals of furore.” Various suggestions were made by sober-minded doctors – that it was the result of animal magnetism, or of a widespread epilepsy, a viral aphrodisiac present in concert halls or even the neurologically discombobulating effects of Liszt’s fast tempi. Suggested cures included blood-letting and opium dosing. But even Heine was wise enough to admit, “It seems to me at times that all this sorcery may be explained by the fact that no one on earth knows so well how to organize his successes, or rather their mise en scene, as our Franz Liszt."
For respectable, conservative-minded members of society, it was always a huge relief when Liszt finally left town. As one German newspaper put it, “the women are once again taking care of children, kitchen, and husband.” They were even more relieved when Liszt finally called it a day with his concert-touring in 1847. It was partly that he had a new woman in his life, partly that he was ready to try something else. Despite all the glamour of his performing years, Liszt was nothing if not a serious artist, and it was the latter he now wanted to focus his full attention on. With all of his most significant work as a composer still in front of him, including his orchestral tone poems, his Dante Symphony and his superb Piano Sonata, it would prove to be a wise decision.
He later renounced a little more of his old high life in order to get himself ordained and enter a monastery. He would spend the last twenty-five years of his life known as Abbé Liszt, and his titles included that of an ordained exorcist – perhaps ironic for a man whose mesmerizing skills at the piano had once been so closely associated with the dark arts.
To read more from David Hackett, go to www.musicbytheyear.com