Chapter 20 - Liszt on the Road

Summary

The cliché that Franz Liszt was the rock star of nineteenth-century music at least captures something of what, as early as 1841, was known as ‘Lisztomania’. It also registers the extraordinary breadth and success of his travels as a virtuoso pianist. (Ken Russell shrewdly cast a real rock star, The Who’s Roger Daltrey, in the 1975 film Lisztomania.) The arc of Liszt’s entire life was of someone constantly on the move: quitting the provincial Hungarian village where he was raised to move to Vienna at age eleven, then at twelve to Paris and last, until near the end, when he divided his final years among Weimar, Rome and Budapest. The principal concern here will be the concentrated decade of Liszt’s almost constant concert touring, beginning in Vienna in 1838 and ending in Ukraine in 1847 with his decision to devote himself to composition, conducting and teaching. During his touring years, sometimes called the Glanzzeit (Time of Splendour), Liszt gave more than a thousand concerts, logged tens of thousands of miles and travelled from Glasgow to Gibraltar, Lisbon to Naples, St Petersburg to Constantinople.¹ In a time before easy travel (he rarely used trains during those years, mainly going by horse-drawn coach) such scope is astonishing.