Franz Liszt (1811 – 1886): Années de Pèlerinage, Deuxième Année, Italie
Long before Justin Bieber, Tom Jones, the Beatles or Frank Sinatra, there was Franz Liszt.
He was not quite history’s First Rock Star. Several before him, including Alessandro Rolla, John Field, Niccolò Paganini and the eighteenth century castrato legend Farinelli, might have laid equal claim to such an honour. But Liszt would certainly take things to a whole new level, lending his name to an astonishing pan-European craze of the 1840s: Lisztomania.
Not that the man behind it all ever planned it that way. Born in the small village of Doborján in the German-speaking region of Hungary (then a part of the Austrian empire)*, his initial ambition was simply to make a career from playing the piano. Growing up in a stable, if slightly conservative household, much of Franz Liszt’s musical education was steeped in sound Classical traditions.
*Liszt would never learn his native tongue fluently. He grew up speaking German before adopting French as his main language.
His father Adam, an accomplished amateur musician and land steward to the famous Austro-Hungarian Esterházy family, would become one of Franz’s first teachers, as well as his mentor and manager. Adam himself had played ‘cello at various times in the Esterházy court orchestra, where he had personally known both Joseph Haydn and Johann Nepomuk Hummel. He soon saw to it that his son was diligently practicing Bach fugues, while using his court connections to arrange him tuition from some of Europe’s finest – composition lessons from the Italian opera composer Ferdinando Paer, singing from Antonio Salieri and piano tuition from that doyen of piano pedagogues, Carl Czerny. Although Czerny was inundated with work at the time and initially reluctant to take on another pupil, he was soon offering his services for free once he had heard the younger Liszt play.
Under the guidance of his father and his distinguished teachers, Franz would make such rapid progress that he was giving professional recitals by the time he was nine years old. Such was his early prowess that one contemporary noted, “I am convinced that the soul and spirit of Mozart have passed into the body of young Liszt.” As his performing reputation began to spread beyond the borders of Austria in his early teens, his father eventually took both of them off to Paris where he rightly guessed Franz would have more opportunity to show off his unusual gifts.
As a teenager, Franz would fearlessly tackle 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 in 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 wrecking 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.
But Franz Liszt’s path to performer extraordinaire certainly wasn’t a linear one. When his father suddenly died of typhoid fever in 1827, he was still only 16 years old, and without Adam’s direction he gave up performing for five years. He instead moved in with his mother (also now resident in Paris), taking modest accommodation and making a living from giving piano lessons. For a time, he even considered taking holy orders. A dedicated Catholic his whole life (if a somewhat liberal one) this was a less capricious move than it might first appear. “Were it not for a certain independence which I do not think I ought to combat,” Liszt once told a friend, “I would willingly turn Franciscan.” His faith (such as it was) would express itself in other ways, whether through socially progressive views, a generous attitude towards rivals and less celebrated contemporaries, or even through his own creative powers, lending his best music its highly distinctive spiritual depth.
Having gradually made himself known among the musical elite of the day, both in Paris and further afield, Liszt would befriend the likes of Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Wagner and the Schumanns, Robert and Clara (Clara being herself a rival pianist). By now a handsome, well-groomed young man, he moved in all 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 Niccolò Paganini in 1832 that Liszt felt inspired to return to playing and become the pianistic equivalent of the great violin virtuoso. Accordingly, he stepped up his practice regime (sometimes to fourteen hours a day) and began to perform much more in Paris. Despite his friendship with Frédéric Chopin (with whom he occasionally appeared in concert) and the numerous comparisons made between them, Chopin refused to allow any direct rivalry between them, quite deliberately eschewing Liszt’s flamboyant style and preferring to play for small, private gatherings.
If Liszt did have a pianistic rival in 1830s Paris it was probably in the shape of Swiss-Austrian virtuoso Sigismond Thalberg. A certain tension would arise between the two men as to who was better, until it was agreed to settle the issue with an “ivory duel” in the early part of 1837. With neither side declared a winner in their own respective recitals, the two men agreed to perform side by side at a single concert at the salon of the Princess of Belgiojoso, in aid of Italian refugees. Rather unhelpfully, victory was then claimed by both camps, while Belgiojsos diplomatically pronounced that while Thalberg was “the first pianist in the world” Liszt was “unique”. But it is notable that Thalberg appeared less on the concert platform after this date, while Liszt’s career was about to take off beyond all expectation.
Two years later, and on the proviso that he was raising funds for a Beethoven memorial in Bonn, Liszt 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 gobby Bohemian in Prague who “had drunk more than he had.”
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 Honoré de 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 bloodletting 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, soon after deciding to take up a traditional Kapellmeister post in Weimar. 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, it would prove to be a wise decision.
Now settling into the most intensive period of his creative life, Liszt’s musical horizons spread both towards his past and his future. On the one hand, he wanted to expand his range of compositional writing, and not least develop his ability to write large scare orchestral works. But he also wanted to consolidate everything he had done so far, extensively revising (and sometimes rewriting) piano works which he had composed on the hoof during his years of touring and often used at concerts.
One prime example of this is his second volume of a monumental set of piano works known as the Années de Pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage). Regarded by some as his masterwork, the collection arguably gives us a closer impression of Liszt the pianist than anything else he wrote. And slightly confusingly (though typically for Liszt) the second volume of the collection was written first, and is made up of pieces composed in the dozen years after 1837, finishing with the monumental “Dante” Sonata written in 1849. Referring to this period of his life as a time of “pilgrimage” may have been a sly piece of revisionism on the part of a pleasure-seeking bon viveur, and it would cause one or two cynics of the time to raise an eyebrow. But there can be no doubt over the quality of the work itself, which contains music of a deep and innovative beauty.
This second volume, known as the Deuxième Année (Second Year) represents nothing less than a new way of writing for the piano. It is perhaps the first ever music to exploit the full sonorities of the modern-day instrument, and not least in exploring the acoustical space between the highest and lowest registers. Above all, this is music that seems to grow organically and naturally out of the piano itself, almost as if Liszt had had the means to record himself improvising each piece, before simply transcribing the end result.
The seven pieces that make up the Deuxième Année are highly original in other ways. Although technically less refined than his great contemporary Frédéric Chopin, Liszt was arguably more avant-garde in pushing against accepted harmonic boundaries. He finds ever more unusual ways to modulate between keys, producing at times an intense but seductive chromaticism that clearly anticipates the mature operas of his friend and colleague Richard Wagner.
The other key characteristic of the Années de Pèlerinage pieces are their heavy reliance on literary and cultural references. The Deuxième Année, subtitled “Italie”, draws on several Renaissance writers and painters whose works Liszt had encountered during several tours of the country.
The first piece, entitled Sposalizio, is a musical meditation on Raphael’s 1504 painting The Marriage of the Virgin, depicting the wedding ceremony between the virgin Mary and Joseph. The music, mostly serene but with the odd dramatic interruption, is based around a pentatonic theme (unusual for its time) suggesting bells, as well as a solemn wedding march that is allowed to evolve in subtle ways over the course of the piece.
The second number, Il Penseroso (The Thinker), is based upon Michelangelo’s famous statue of a young duke, Lorenzo de Medici, sitting in pensive, melancholy contemplation. Liszt’s own reaction to the sculpture can be deduced from the slow, lugubrious pace of the music (marked “sotto voce” throughout) and its gloomy-sounding minor key dissonances, prevalent in the bass registers of the piano.
By way of contrast, the next piece, Canzonetta del Salvator Rosa, is a much more upbeat number, employing a courtly, march-like melody (actually composed by minor Baroque composer Giovanni Bononcini) as its main theme. Flamboyant and controversial in his day, and a painter of romanticized landscapes, often using dark and dramatic colours, Salvator Rosa (1615 – 1673) was something of a cult figure among the early Romantics. The English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley once wrote of him, “his name came to be a kind of code word for the qualities most appreciated by the romantics… savage sublimity, terror, grandeur, astonishment, and pleasing horror…”
For the next trio of pieces, Liszt moves from Italian art to literature, with three meditations on sonnets by the 14th century poet Petrarch (numbers 47, 104 and 123) all focusing on the poet’s love for an unattainable woman named Laura. In his own time, Liszt had been known for his dalliances with married women, and one wonders if the sonnets spoke to him in any personal way.
The three Petrarch meditations (in D Flat Major, E Major and A Flat Major respectively) show Liszt’s early style at its freest and most expansive, employing an almost operatic Bel Canto type of writing (long, expressive melodies, continual rubatos and virtuosic decoration) to suggest the many conflicting emotions present in the poems.
Finally comes the crowning achievement of the Deuxième Année collection, the “Dante” Sonata, or to give it its full title, Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia Quasi Sonata (After Reading Dante: Fantasia Quasi Sonata). This much longer piece is based on Victor Hugo’s 1836 poem of the same name, (“When the poet paints hell, he paints his life / His life, a shadow that flees from spectres, pursued…”). Liszt evidently saw the subject matter as ideal for the two polarized extremes in his own musical identity. Throughout the work, hellish visions (symbolized by tritones and other dissonant harmonies, dramatic tremolos and furious D Minor flourishes) alternate with something more heavenly and beatific (as exemplified by a beautiful, chorale-like second theme in F Sharp Major).
Although Liszt was just hitting middle age when he wrote the Dante Sonata, it clearly looks back towards his barnstorming years as a performer, not least in the way it showcases all sides to his virtuosity – the pyrotechnic displays, the use of brutal, percussive rhythms and the contrasting moments of serene, sublime beauty.
Although completed in 1849, the Deuxième Année collection would wait another nine years before publication. During that time, Liszt would establish order by writing (and publishing) its prequel, Première Année: Suisse, based upon his artistic experiences of Switzerland (though this time with much more emphasis on the country’s landscapes rather than culture).
Having by now forsaken much of his former existence as a virtuosic firebrand, Liszt would spend much of the 1850s as a major driving force of modern music, writing most of his best works, including his orchestral tone poems, his Dante Symphony and his superb Piano Sonata.
He later renounced a little more of his old high life, having himself ordained as a minor cleric and withdrawing to a monastery for a time. In old age he became known as Abbé Liszt, his titles including that of an ordained exorcist – ironic perhaps for a man whose mesmerizing skills at the piano had once been so closely associated with the dark arts.
Suggestions for Further Listening
In the early part of his composing career, Liszt had a habit of sitting on works for years, sometimes decades, before allowing them into print. Partly it was a wariness towards certain conservative critics who had a tendency to savage his works – many of them simply could not accept Liszt the swashbuckling performer as a serious composer. But it also signaled a certain perfectionism, not least as Liszt’s creative abilities would undergo an impressive evolution throughout the late 1840s and 50s, where he was forever looking to improve his existing work.
By way of example, his First and Second Piano Concertos, both started in the 1830s, were endlessly rewritten and revised, with Liszt holding back publication on each for around a quarter of a century.
Similarly his Transcendental Études, published in his early forties, had their origins in piano pieces he first wrote down as a teenager.