Franz Liszt: The world’s first rock star
If you can, quickly put on ‘Un Sospiro’, the last of three concert etudes composed by Franz Liszt between 1845 and 1849. If you’re listening now, you’ll already understand why the virtuoso was such a sensation in 19th-century Europe. The grand piano is a highly mechanised instrument, but Liszt made it sound like water, just as Jimi Hendrix made the electric guitar sound like a snarling jaguar centuries later. The comparison isn’t as outlandish as it seems: Liszt, a world-famous musician revered by critics and loved by women, was a rock star in every sense of the word.
You’ll undoubtedly have heard of Beatlemania. You might even have heard of its ’50s forerunner – Presleymania. But how many of you have heard of “Lisztomonia”? The phenomenon was noted by the German poet Heinrich Heine, who, like so many European intellectuals of his day, was struck by the composer’s superhuman pianistic talent and Byronesque charisma. Music’s Romantic era was nearing its climax, and Liszt’s combination of talent, brooding intensity and long hair made him ferociously popular among the polite salons and concert halls of Europe.
Franz Liszt began receiving piano lessons at the age of seven from his father, a talented pianist, violinist, cellist and guitarist. Adam Liszt, rather conveniently, was also chummy with some of the most important composers of the age, including Joseph Hyden and Ludwig van Beethoven. By the age of eleven, Liszt was composing pieces for piano and orchestra, embarking on his first European concert hall tour in 1839.
The eight-year outing was a massive undertaking but more than worth the effort. As well as countless honours and awards, Liszt’s performances won him enormous fame, with polite ladies literally throwing themselves at the composer’s feet, fighting over broken piano strings (his performance style really was that frenzied) and cutting off locks of his hair. It’s believed that some women even salvaged his discarded cigar butts and placed them in their cleavage.
As is so often the case, Liszt’s fame was in part a product of his dynamism. Yes, his performances were incredibly emotionally charged, but he was also a very dynamic personality, seducing both women and audiences with his charm and talent for public speaking. Indeed, the Lisztomania phenomenon was so intense in its effects that it was considered by some to be a genuine medical condition.
In The Virtuoso Liszt, Dana Gooley quotes an 1843 clipping from a Munich newspaper which reads: “Liszt fever, a contagion that breaks out in every city our artist visits, and which neither age nor wisdom can protect, seems to appear here only sporadically, and asphyxiating cases such as appeared so often in northern capitals need not be feared by our residents, with their strong constitutions.”
Liszt’s performances weren’t just popular. They were radical. And like all genuinely radical phenomena, they were feared by polite society. The Berlinese elite must have been shocked to see their wives and daughters so moved by something so new. Like the rockstars of the 1960s and ’70s, Liszt seems to have recognised the erotic power of music, deliberately placing his piano in profile to the audience so they could see his face dripping with sweat as he swung his hair back to tackle yet another glissando.
His pieces also require a huge amount of physicality. ‘Un Sospiro’ (a musical endurance test if ever there was one) requires the performer to play an octave-spanning arpeggio with two hands, with the left-hand crossing over the right to play the melody in the mid-register while simultaneously keeping up the bass. And that’s just the first few bars! If there’s anyone to make Eric Clapton look like a posturing layabout, it’s definitely Franz Liszt.