Mária Eckhardt
Liszt as Father
Franz Liszt: Lettres à Cosima et à Daniela. Ed. by Klára Hamburger. (Musique-
musicologie Series, General Editor Malou Haine), Sprimont, Mardaga, 1996, 238 pp.
When Charles Suttoni published an expanded and annotated bibliography of Liszt's correspondence in 1989, he estimated the number of letters written by Liszt at around 10,000. By then, approximately 6,500 had appeared in print, a large proportion either in truncated form or in a presentation lacking suitable editorial or scholarly standards. Nor is Liszt's correspondence with his immediate family better known. His letters to his mother (with a few exceptions) appeared in a German translation by La Mara, frequently diverging from the originals; his mother's surviving letters to him were not included. His correspondence with the mother of his children, Marie d'Agoult, has been available together with a modest commentary since 1934, thanks to his grandson Daniel Ollivier's largely faithful publication. Still, the long-awaited new critical edition, announced ten years ago by Serge Gut and Jacqueline Bellas, would certainly provide much new and interesting material. It is also to Daniel Ollivier's credit that Liszt's correspondence with his oldest child, Blandine (1835-1862), appeared in print.
[...]
There are 120 letters to Cosima in the volume, supplemented by 33 letters to the oldest of Cosima's five children, and Liszt's favourite grandchild, Daniela von Bülow. The introduction, the commentary and the appendices contain several other letters from Liszt (to Blandine Liszt, and to two other grandchildren, Eva and Siegfried Wagner). There are two further letters in the appendices which are not by Liszt, but aid our understanding of his letters: a letter from Cosima to Marie von Schleinitz, and one by Blandine Liszt to her father. The major part of the documentation survived in Cosima's papers and is deposited in the Archives at Bayreuth. Thirteen letters and a fragment of one letter, however, are a part of the Blandine Liszt-Ollivier papers placed in the Manuscript Collection of the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris, at the request of her son Daniel Ollivier. Unfortunately, neither Cosima's nor Daniela's letters to Liszt are known, and presumably have not survived. For this reason the collection can only present one side, unlike the Blandine correspondence, which presents both.
The necessary biographical background to accompany all the original material is provided in Klára Hamburger's extensive introduction, and her commentary on individual letters addresses concrete and detailed issues.
The first group of letters are those written to the child Cosima, who, after the final breach between her parents in 1844, was brought up in Paris, along with her brother and sister, under the loving supervision of her grandmother Anna Liszt, with the assistance of governesses. Liszt, the travelling virtuoso, who retired in the Grandduchy of Weimar in 1848 as Hofkapellmeister, followed his children's progress only from afar, though maintaining sole responsibility for their upkeep. The first four letters (from the period of 1845 to 1849) conjure up the same kind and devoted father whom we have already known from the published correspondence to Blandine and to the children as a group. (Two of these four letters had already been published in 1900 by Cosima, and so, exceptionally, these have figured fairly frequently in the Liszt literature.) Unlike Marie d'Agoult, who broke off all contact with her children, Liszt gave them everything he felt they needed. There was just one thing that he didn't realize: nothing can take the place of actually being with them. He didn't even understand the joy the children felt when, in 1850, they met their mother by chance, after living for nearly six years in the same city without ever seeing her. Fearing with good reason that Marie would paint a distorted picture of him for the children (as she had already done in public with her novel Nélida), his reaction was to place them under far stricter supervision than they had been up till then. The authoritarian, sometimes even ruthless, tone which Liszt struck in the ensuing letters is clear evidence of the influence of his new companion Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein; it was likely to do anything but awaken childish love. The letters of this period, written to Cosima (almost without exception they appear in print for the first time) will hardly surprise those
familiar with the publications of Robert Bory,10 Jacques Vier11 and Daniel Ollivier,12 which reveal the paternal tongue-lashing Liszt directed at the children, addressed in part directly to Blandine or all the children, and in part indirectly, through Anna Liszt. The tone changed once again when Cosima became the fiancée (1856) and then wife (1857) of Hans von Bülow, Liszt's favourite pupil. From then on Liszt wrote anew with warm love to his daughter, but with the respect due to the adult woman. From this point onwards the letters become very interesting from a musical point of view too. Liszt discussed
specific issues regarding the conception and reception of his own works in countless cases; the Missa Solennis is one example. Additionally, from then on, Richard Wagner's name begins to appear with increasing frequency in letters to Cosima. Liszt's children had known him personally and respected him through their father from their early years in Paris (1853). As is well known, Liszt and later Cosima's husband, Hans von Bülow, were instrumental in furthering Wagner's interests.
Cosima and von Bülow's marriage turned out to be a disaster, and Cosima's respect and admiration for Wagner shortly developed into passionate love. It was in November 1863 when they declared their feelings for one another, although by then Cosima had already borne two of von Bülow's children (Daniela and Blandine), and von Bülow had become the main exponent of Wagner's works. Liszt strove desperately to save the marriage, but was unable to prevent Cosima from leaving her husband and permanently uniting herself with Wagner in 1868. By that time she had borne two of Wagner's children, in 1865 and 1867, and was carrying a third. There are six rather interesting letters from Liszt in the collection from this difficult period, largely unknown earlier. That of December 14, 1865 is the most desperately outspoken and full of questions: what would become of the three people of irreconcilably tangled lives, who in different ways were equally and immeasurably important to the heart of Liszt? "Dieu vous garde!", the tormented letter exclaims.
Liszt's fatherly love for Cosima, by now his only remaining child, was put to a great test when Cosima decided openly in favour of Wagner, turned Protestant in order to marry him, and, rejecting her French upbringing, embraced Wagner's German nationalism. Cosima's letter to Marie von Schleinitz, which Hamburger includes in the book's appendix, is shocking: Liszt's daughter wanted her father to make her decision known to the humiliated, cuckolded von Bülow, and as he was not willing, Cosima refused to speak to him for years.
At this point Daniela von Bülow, Cosima's oldest child enters the correspondence. Although in 1870, the year of Wagner and Cosima's marriage, Daniela was only ten years old and hardly knew her grandfather, Liszt wrote to her conveying between the lines an affection which in truth was directed at his daughter. It is as if the first two letters in the book, to Daniela, are to atone for the stern letters which Liszt had written to the adolescent Cosima: " ...toujours prés de vous et võtre bien aimée Maman. Dites-lui mon grand désir de la revoir; fasse le Ciel que ce soit bientõt." "[My heart] ...is always with you and your much loved Mother. Tell her how much I long to see her again; Heaven let it happen soon," he writes to Daniela in April 1871. Within a few months, thanks possibly to the intervention of Marie von Schleinitz, contact was re-established, and from September 1871, Liszt was writing directly to Cosima once again, although the final reconciliation had to wait a further year.
[...] One of the main themes of Liszt's letters to Cosima is, naturally, Wagner and the staging of his works in Bayreuth, in support of which Liszt spared no effort. This undiminishing enthusiasm with which Liszt championed Wagner's works to the very end is touching, especially considering what the publication of Cosima's diary revealed: Wagner responded to works by the aged Liszt with utter incomprehension, even with loathing. It is also touching how openly Liszt spoke to Cosima of difficulties regarding his relationship with Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein and Baroness Olga von Meyendorff, the two women who were at that time closest to him. At the same time, he was unequivocally supportive of Carolyne, to whom Cosima had shown deep antipathy since adolescence. (On the other hand, we know that in the presence of Carolyne he defended, praised and offered explanations for Cosima whenever he could. Carolyne, namely, saw quite clearly how Wagner used Cosima, and also through her, Liszt, in order to endorse his own special interests.)
We had already suspected how important the family bond was to Liszt which in his old age he hoped to have with Cosima and Wagner. The newly published letters confirm this. It is startling, however, to what degree Cosima subordinated everything to her adulation of Wagner, who was extraordinarily jealous of Liszt. "On a number of occasions Cosima could have made her father happy," writes Hamburger, "but she always fulfilled her husban's demands instead." Without doubt the most painful thing for Liszt must have been that, after Wagner's death in 1883, Cosima retired into seclusion and did not wish to see her father again, breaking off even written contact with him. Liszt magnanimously acknowledged his daughter's decision ("Je comprends, admire, et l'aime de toute mon âme," ("I understand, admire, and love her with all my soul,") he writes and accepted that Daniela should once again take Cosima's place in his correspondence.
Mária Eckhardt
is Director of the Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum and Research Centre in Budapest.
