Chapter 13 - Liszt, Women and Salon Culture

Summary

No well-known European musician in the nineteenth century retained such an extensive network of female contacts who challenged traditional feminine roles as Franz Liszt. Indeed, I would argue that it was precisely such women who inspired Franz Liszt, who attracted him and entered into a reciprocal process of intellectual, artistic, companionable or erotic approximation with him. Such women had either already independently broken the traditional barriers of class and gender roles – as, for example, the writers Bettina von Arnim (1785–1859) and George Sand (1804–76) – or were encouraged through their encounter with Liszt to critical self-development, as, for example, the salonnière and later writer Marie d’Agoult (1805–76).² The women mentioned belong to the context of European salon culture,³ which had started to revive with the movement of bourgeois artists away from the courts.