Introduction: New Beginnings

Summary

Although Franz Liszt (1811–86) remains one of the world's most celebrated performers, he wanted more than anything else to be known and appreciated as a composer. To his abiding consternation and frustration, such recognition eluded him. The public yearned for the pianist Liszt after he relinquished that role in 1847; at the same time, the barbs cast at his music in the 1850s and 1860s festered within him. In confronting his self-image in the final decade before his death in 1886, Liszt crafted different public and private personae: before his public he was a musical luminary with significant artistic accomplishments to his credit and potential power to infl uence decisions in the musical world—in effect a musical elder statesman— while to his closest friends he revealed a vulnerable side that betrayed his insecurity as a composer. In exploring his self-presentation, beginning with its most overt manifestations and ending with his most private soul-searchings, I argue that this intelligent, articulate nineteenth-century musician of extraordinary talent was able to reconcile his inner conflicts with the aid of a personally constructed Christian moral philosophy.

Two reasons prompted my decision to concentrate on the years 1877 to 1886: they circumscribe Liszt's final decade, age sixty-five to seventy-four, when, by the reckoning of his time, he counted as an old man. 1877 also marks his vow to discontinue all public piano performance, even for charity events, in which he had continued to participate after his retirement from the concert stage in 1847. He maintained this resolve with very few exceptions. Having removed once and for all the chief catalyst that enabled critics to focus on his pianistic and ignore his compositional skills, Liszt still continued to fight his battle with the critics (and with himself) about his worth as a composer. The book explores how Liszt grappled with his self-image and its presentation to others in the final stage of his life.

Liszt's conflicted sense of self emerged as I read his correspondence with the two most important women in his life at this time, Carolyne von Sayn- Wittgenstein (1819–87) and Olga von Meyendorff (1838–1926).