5 - Imagined Identities

Summary

This chapter lays out the theological and literary background for understanding Liszt's words in the remaining portion of the book. It reveals that the persona which Liszt presented to Carolyne, and in a somewhat lesser degree to Olga, was grounded in his three-fold spiritual identification with Christ, Job, and the Good Thief Saint Dismas, all of whom exemplify the topos of suffering. In his later years Liszt concentrated on a particular aspect of Christological signification, the suffering Christ who submitted himself to his father's will. Significantly, that very emphasis lies at the core of Saint Francis of Assisi's life and the Franciscan order, for both of which Liszt felt an affinity. Liszt was also attracted to the Good Thief Saint Dismas. Through the rhetoric of the Good Thief who suffered by Christ's side, Liszt could express both repentance for his faults and hope for his life to come. Liszt was also drawn to the Old Testament character of Job. On 19 February 1883, he wrote: “Job is my patron from the Old Testament, and the Good Thief Saint Dimas [Dismas], that of the New.” Although Job, like Christ, represented limitless suffering in life, he too played a part in Liszt's quest for spiritual consolation and positive resignation at the end of his life.

The chapter explores Liszt's association with these figures and how it was informed by the rhetoric of nineteenth-century Catholic thought as well as by the religious sentiment of the early Romantic writers Chateaubriand, Lamennais, and Lamartine. Whereas earlier in life Liszt had been drawn to, even identified with despairing individuals such as Byron, Werther, and Faust, he turned in these late years increasingly to religious figures of hope and consolation and essentially discarded his secular figures of despair.

Suffering in Nineteenth-Century French Thought

Suffering, which makes us cry out or finally fall wretchedly silent, knows no majesty. It is nothing great, nothing sublime; at root it is something entirely different from a powerful, solidaristic suffering-with [Mitleiden]. It is not simply a sign of love; rather, it is much more a horrifying sign of no longer being able to love. It is that suffering which leads into nothingness if it is not a suffering unto God.