Introduction: Liszt and England, Past and Present

Summary

The present volume is based on diary entries, playbills, programs, press reports and archival material, mainly from British and European sources. As such it represents the first comprehensive analysis of Liszt's executant, compositional, and literary activities in London and the English provinces. Also incorporated is a detailed listing of the composer's London publications and selected correspondence while in England. A final chapter focuses on major developments on the Lisztian front from 1945 to the present day.

In order to approach the subject with clarity and ease the following subdivisions are adopted:

Documents and secondary material, published between 1835 and 2000, relative to Liszt's early visits to England, plus reviews of pre-1865 performances of works of Liszt, published before 2000.

Documents and secondary material relative to Liszt's final visit to England published between 1886 and 2000.

Documents and secondary material relative to Liszt's visits to England published between 2000 and 2013.

Documents and Secondary Material: Early Visits

When I began the research more than twenty years ago that has grown into Liszt and England. I commenced by investigating what had appeared in print during the nineteenth and early twentieth century on Liszt's English activities. I examined Joseph d'Ortigue's 1835 biographical study, the encyclopaedic Liszt essays of Gustav Schilling and François Fétis, the six letters from Liszt's father, Ádám Liszt, published in the Münchener Propylàen, Charlotte Moscheles's Aus Moscheles’ Leben, the first of the two installments of Lina Ramann's Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch, Liszt entries in the various editions of Grove's Dictionary up to the 1927 edition, and Volume 1 of the Correspondance de Liszt et de la Comtesse d'Agoult edited by the late Serge Gut and Jacqueline Bellas—all this before re-reading what Sacheverell Sitwell, Humphrey Searle, Alan Walker, Adrian Williams, and others had written about Liszt's pre-1842 visits to England.

A cache of playbills and a rich vein of press and journal material lay waiting to be unearthed. They would soon provide me with evidence of several unknown performances by Liszt in London in 1824, 1825, 1827, 1840, and 1841. More important: a few uncatalogued compositions that Liszt wrote with others would also be brought to light.