Liszt's Life after Death

An Interview with Alan Walker

 

Judit Rácz: You are here again in Hungary for the Hungarian publication of The Death of Franz Liszt Based on the Unpublished Diary of His Pupil Lina Schmalhausen. The diary recounts the last ten days of Liszt's life and tells a very different story than the accepted version of a well-cosseted Liszt dying peacefully with the word "Tristan" on his lips.

Alan Walker: The diary, for which I wrote a long preface and epilogue putting it into its proper biographical context, corrects the sanitized version of Liszt's death put about by the Bayreuth publicity machine. When he died, he was in Bayreuth, right in the middle of the 1886 Festival. After Wagner's death in 1883, Cosima was left in sole charge of the Festival, and she had asked her father to attend it in order to drum up some badly needed publicity, because the event was suffering a deficit. The premier performance of Tristan und Isolde was scheduled to take place, and there was a performance of Parsifal too. Liszt attended both, but he was already seriously ill. The fact that he passed away in Bayreuth enabled Cosima to put out a number of stories picked up by the early biographers about how Liszt died, allegedly surrounded by a loving family, and, worst of all, with the dying word "Tristan" on his lips. We know now that these stories were completely false. And we know this because Lina Schmalhausen produced an 84-page document relating, in graphic detail, the last ten days of Liszt's life. I used the diary to round out the story of Liszt's death in the third volume of my biography, and it did attract some attention from readers.

Franz Liszt, a photograph taken in Hungary, 1876.

A copy of it has been in my possession since as early as 1977. It is a riveting story: it tells a tale of family neglect, of medical malpractice, and of behaviour bordering on cruelty. We have a saying in English: "Bad things can happen to good people." I often think of that in connection with the way Liszt died.

Who was with Liszt during those last days?

Aside from Cosima, there were two of her daughters (Daniela and Eva), various functionaries, acquaintances, pupils and his manservant Miska. Lina Schmalhausen arrived at Bayreuth at Liszt's invitation, and was allowed proximity to Liszt in the first days. Cosima hated her, and the feeling was reciprocated. Lina was also highly unpopular with the other pupils who were present at Bayreuth at that time, expecting some free lessons from Liszt. He was a kind of Pied Piper of Hamelin—wherever he travelled a coterie of students and followers and hangers-on just trailed behind him. If Liszt had not gone to Bayreuth, they would not have been there either. When it became evident to Cosima that her father's illness was lifethreatening, she banished the students from his sickroom. Most of them, much to Lina's disgust, had a lot of fun in the local pubs in nearby hamlets. Cosima gave strict orders to Miska, instructing who was to be admitted to her father and who wasn't. Lina somehow got the better of Cosima because she simply stayed in the garden and was able to look into Liszt's room from the stairs of the veranda. That's how she was able to witness Liszt's last days and hours, the bodily symptoms, the injections given by the doctors, the care—or the lack of it—he was given. The diary of Lina Schmalhausen was in fact produced by default: Lina Ramann, Liszt's official biographer, was ill at the time. When she heard that Liszt had died in Bayreuth, she wanted a full account from someone who had been there throughout and whom she could trust—so she asked Fräulein Schmalhausen to write it. Shortly after Liszt's death Lina dipped her pen in vitriol and let fly. She had old scores to settle against Cosima as well as some of the students she actively disliked, and who disliked her. So you have to treat this highly personal document as you treat any other similar document: you crosscheck it for accuracy by comparing it with evidence from other sources. There were enough people in Bayreuth who at the time also kept diaries and wrote letters. All the major factual assertions that Lina articulates can be proved to be accurate. As for her opinions, they are a matter of interpretation.

You note that she did all sorts of things for Liszt—housekeeping and taking care of him when he was ill—and they also allowed themselves intimate gestures in public, all of which implies they were physically close. Does it matter whether they were lovers or not?

It matters in the sense that if they were lovers, we have to say so. And there is no evidence that they were. They were certainly very alive to the perception that they might create. It is my conviction that on Liszt's side, it was a father-daughter relationship. As for Lina, I have no doubt that she was in love with Liszt, but then so were many of his students. She, however, had the great advantage of having crossed Liszt's path when he needed a woman's touch in his life.

The Diary provides some fascinating psychological insights into the portrait of Liszt and his times, and of the people surrounding him.

Let's examine the story: since Wagner's death, and for the rest of her life, Liszt's daughter Cosima was a professional widow. By now she hardly talked to her father and she did not even answer his letters. There is a famous episode that characterises the declining relationship between the pair. Liszt attended the 1884 Bayreuth festival which was, for the first time, directed by the widow. Late one night, Liszt lingered in the Festspielhaus after the performance was over, the lights were dimmed, the curtains lowered, the theatre was empty. He was walking along the dimly-lit corridors towards the exit, and suddenly he saw Cosima walking towards him, and he called out, "Cosette!". She just walked right past him, like a ghost, ignoring him. The story comes from Liszt himself. By the early summer of 1886, when the future of the Festival was in jeopardy, Cosima came to him with the unvarnished request that he should visit Bayreuth and help; she knew that his presence would stimulate the ticket sales. Liszt naturally obliged, referring to himself cynically as "Bayreuth's Poodle". It illustrates the golden thread that ran through Liszt's life. His watchword was génie oblige: "Genius carries obligations." If you have a world profile, and the world recognises you as a genius, why waste your celebrity by staying at home and doing nothing with it? Liszt was a great believer in using his celebrity and placing it in the service of worthy causes, and he thought Wagner's art was such a cause. He made a clear and interesting distinction between Wagner the man and Wagner the musician, and was probably the first to do so—we may call it Liszt's posthumous "gift" to Wagner. Ever since, this is how we have viewed Wagner, as we do with no other composer really (being moved to tears by his music while saying, "Oh, but the man was pretty awful!"). In 1886, Liszt was approaching his 75th birthday, and he received many special invitations to honour this anniversary, most of which he accepted. By the time he got to Bayreuth he was exhausted and ill, having contracted pneumonia a short time earlier in Munkácsy's château in Luxemburg. But he went simply because Cosima had asked him to do so.

How did Lina's account affect you? A friend of mine called it an endlessly sad story.

That is probably one of the best ways to put it. It contributes to the idea of Liszt as a kind of King Lear, being caused endless grief by his nearest and dearest. The story had to be told, because what had been said in the earlier biographies about his death was preposterous and absurd—and we all believed it for much too long. I, too, grew up with the Hollywood version of Liszt's life and death.

What does the story add to the portrait of Cosima?

It does explain much of Cosima's ambivalence towards her father, the roots of this ambivalence going back to her childhood when she felt intense loneliness and neglect. Her father hardly ever saw her and the other children. If we stand back and look at the story of Liszt's last years and last days from a distance, it can almost seem like payback time: "Because you neglected me when I was a child, I shall neglect you when you are an old man and need my services as you are about to die." Of course, I am not suggesting that this was a deliberately malicious way of handling the situation on her side, but it is an intriguing way to interpret what happened. The circle, so to say, was closed.

You write extensively about the Liszt–Wagner "competition". Wagner seems to have been the winner.

In Liszt and Wagner circles the topic may be still alive, but for the general public this "competition" has long since died. It is like comparing apples and oranges. If you ask who was the greater composer of piano music, transcriptions and songs—there is no contest, it was Liszt. If you ask who was the greater opera composer, it was Wagner. But if you stand back and look at these two giants complete, and ask who was the greater, I can only say that musical criticism has enough difficulties distinguishing between a Beethoven and a Boccherini. To compare and contrast a Liszt and a Wagner—we simply do not have the right criteria to do this.

People also used to argue about who was the greater innovator.

Innovation and quality are not necessarily connected. Liszt was no doubt a great innovator. There are many well-established proofs of the fact that Wagner got some of his better ideas from Liszt. But the idea itself is never the important element—what is important is what is done with it. And what Wagner did with some of those ideas is quite miraculous. For the rest, Wagner today obviously has a greater following in the world than Liszt does.

How can you describe the nature of their influence on one another?

Wagner was upset for instance when it was made public that he recognised the influence of Liszt's symphonic poems on his own harmonic language... I would simply say that the influence was mutual.

Do you think Liszt has become more popular and more understood compared to thirty years ago?

The answer is yes to both questions. Though we are several generations away from Liszt, the following analogy may be accurate: children often have a happier relationship with their grandparents than with their parents, who are too close. To apply this psychological model to music: we had to wait till the death of Stravinsky, Bartók and Schoenberg before we could see the 19th century in a better perspective. When I was young, growing up in England, one did not readily confess one's love of Tchaikovsky—or Chopin, for that matter: they were much too popular for a musicologist to take them seriously. But later in the 20th century, and certainly now, in the 21st, the 19th century suddenly becomes respectable enough to be put into university courses. And once the Romantic period is revived, Liszt is inevitably revived with it, because he was central to his time. This has not necessarily to do with the quality of his music, but if you were to remove Liszt from the 19th century, you would have great difficulty in imagining how things could have developed in the way that they did. He was a great historical force and the greatest source of influence of his time—but that does not mean he was also the greatest composer.

Do you think the kind of misgivings that surrounded him because of his weaker compositions still prevail?

He did write weak compositions. But we don't remember composers because of their weak compositions. Nobody remembers Beethoven because he wrote the "Battle" Symphony. If you look at the complete catalogue of Liszt's works, you'll find about 1,400 items, ranging from works like the Christus oratorio of three and a half hours, to the shortest song of about one minute. To answer your question: If we find fifty undeniable masterworks among them—and clearly we find more—that is surely enough for Liszt to gain entry into the Pantheon.

Your biography sets you firmly among those who have revived music biographical writing. What tendencies do you see in that genre?

One thing that I have noticed is that biography tends to fall into the hands of musicologists who are wonderful at collecting information but not so wonderful at presenting them in an accessible form. Biography is obviously a branch of literature, but certain techniques developed in musicology are being transplanted into musical biographies. There is an incessant thirst for "where does this fact or piece of information come from". No longer can we say: "Look, take my word for it." But here lies a danger. Modern biographies are stuffed with citations, and sometimes read like telephone directories. Of course, I also use footnotes and citations-but if you'll allow me a rare note of self-congratulation, I do try to make them as interesting and gripping as possible. Musical biography seems to be losing its literary roots, and I am rather sad about that. The typical biographermusicologist today tends to think that the reader owes him his time—whereas he owes him nothing. I've often said, perhaps a little too brazenly, that if I can't hold the reader's attention to the bottom of the first page, and encourage him to turn to the next one, I don't deserve to have a reader.

The "fourth volume" as it were of your Liszt biography, Reflections on Liszt, was published in 2005; an "open letter" to Liszt forms the Epilogue—why the letter?

The very idea of addressing someone who has been dead for more than 120 years, and in whose company I have spent so much of my own life, appealed to me. But I wrote the Open Letter mainly to answer the criticisms expressed in some of the nearly one hundred reviews about my Liszt biography. Some critics accused me of having fallen in love with my subject, leading me to write hagiography. This Letter gave me the opportunity to put some distance between myself and Liszt. I'm very respectful to Liszt, of course. But let me mention here two issues from among the many that I raised in my Letter. I told him that in my opinion he spent far too much time writing to the press, particularly in his twenties and thirties—defending a point of view, promoting an idea, and generally writing about things that in retrospect seem to be trivial. I am also critical of the way Liszt treated his children, because it does amount to neglect. I can understand why it happened. As Peter Raabe put it many years ago: would we really have wanted the world-famous virtuoso and composer to stay at home and be a father and a husband to Marie d'Agoult? In the deepest sense that would have been negligent, and a criminal waste of his gifts, which had to be shared with the rest of the world. But his children certainly missed him, and suffered accordingly.

He had all those pupils in tow. I'm curious about the master-class, which Liszt invented.

The concept of the master-class emerged in the 1850s in Weimar and was social in origin. Every Sunday afternoon Liszt would have a soirée. He would listen to, or take part in, musical performances. His housekeeper, Pauline Apel, would then serve cookies and wine. Sometimes Liszt would send one of his students to the piano, and occasionally would make a comment on the interpretation, or retail some anecdotes about his connections to the composer in question. That is how it all started.

Was there actual teaching going on?

Yes of course. Later on the classes were held three times a week and followed a kind of structure. The class would assemble at a prearranged hour. If the students had a piece of music they wanted to play, they placed it on the piano. Then Liszt would emerge from his bedroom after having taken a siesta (he had often been up since four o'clock in the morning) and advance toward the piano, greeting everybody, going down the aisle like royalty. He would then rifle through the music placed on the piano, and pick out a piece that he wanted to hear, saying, "Well, who plays this?" And the music-making would begin. Liszt would sometimes sit at the second piano or shuffle around silently in his slippers. Then he'd make a comment on a specific interpretation, the tempo, the pedalling, the adjustment of the fingering, or just tell an anecdote ("I well remember when Chopin..." etc.). By and large he avoided technical instruction. He had a famous saying: "Wash your dirty linen at home!" He also said in a spirit of self-sarcasm, and in criticism of the very profession of which we now consider him to have been a central part: "I am no piano professor!". He himself would also play the pieces, often from memory, and treat the student to mighty conceptions of Beethoven especially, and sometimes of Bach, Chopin and Schumann. Many of the students kept diaries. They later recalled such moments after they had returned to their respective countries, and often said: "Liszt played like this!" But sometimes he didn't...

Do you think some of them just exploited his name?

Of course. To be known as a student of Liszt gave one genuine capital. Sometimes Hans von Bülow was brought in to substitute for Liszt if the latter felt indisposed, and one of the first things he did was "to clean out the Augean stables", as he put it. He often gave the students a rough time, accusing them of taking advantage of the master's kindness: "Most of you are not destined for the musical profession at all, and you shouldn't be here." He drew attention to the paradox that "in the best pianist's house you can hear the worst pianists playing."

Does this not discredit Liszt's master-classes and the students in general?

No. The same master-classes also produced Tausig, Siloti, Rosenthal, Friedheim, Reisenauer, Bülow—some of the outstanding pianists of the second half of the 19th century. Don't forget that these classes were free. If the greatest living pianist is offering classes for free, who would not cross oceans to get some? Many arrived, played, but did not stay. Liszt called them "one-day flies". He only referred to the best ones as his students. He even called them "my children".

For the general reader—how would you describe the book you're currently working on, the one about Hans von Bülow?

Hans von Bülow was the first virtuoso conductor—a role which commands attention—and so far there has been no biography of him in English. He seems to have been airbrushed out of music history after his divorce from Cosima, though he continued to play a central part in both Liszt's and Wagner's lives. His artistic career is very interesting. Aside from his conducting, he had a parallel career as a virtuoso concert pianist—for Liszt, he was the concert pianist (with the possible exception of Karl Tausig). After having recovered from the nervous breakdown occasioned by his divorce, he got his concert fingers back in shape and, with some encouragement from Liszt, he embarked on his world tours. He gave more than 3000 recitals in the course of his career. During the first tour of America, in 1875-76, he played 139 recitals and performed more than 1,000 works from memory. Later on he brought the Meiningen Court Orchestra to fame, took them on tour across Europe, demanding that they play everything from memory—Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schubert—everything. Nothing like the perfection of this ensemble had ever been heard before. Imagine an orchestra today—even the best—playing everything from memory! Bülow then became the first artistic director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and in the five years before he died, he conducted 55 concerts with them. He was simultaneously the conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra and the Bremen Philharmonic. For a time he spent his life on trains, commuting from one city to another in an endless circle. And while all this was going on, he continued with his piano tours, presenting the last five sonatas of Beethoven in one recital, and eventually an entire "Beethoven Cycle" spread across four consecutive evenings, which unfolded a chronological sequence of all the main sonatas and variations from the earliest to the latest. The last recital of this Cycle, incidentally, contained not only the Hammerklavier Sonata, but also the hugely demanding Diabelli Variations. And of course, Bülow was a personality. He had the gift of instant retort. Let me give you just two examples. When he was conducting the Meiningen orchestra, he had daily difficulties with two musicians; one was called Schmidt and the other one Schulz. One morning, the orchestra manager comes up to Bülow with the sad news that Herr Schmidt has died the previous night. There is a pause, then Bülow enquires, "and Schulz?" On another occasion, after a piano recital, he arrives back in his hotel quite late, and has to climb the staircase in the dark. Another character was rushing down the stairs at high speed. They collide in the dark. After picking themselves up and brushing off the dust, the other fellow says angrily: "Donkey!" Bülow bows and replies: "Hans von Bülow!" As you can see, he is a biographer's dream.

 

Alan Walker
is Professor Emeritus of Music at McMaster University, Canada and author of numerous books, including Reflections of Liszt; The Death of Franz Liszt Based on the Unpublished Diary of His Pupil Lina Schmalhausen; Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years 1811–1847; The Weimar Years 1848–1861; The Final Years 1861–1886. He is currently at work on a biography of Hans von Bülow scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press in 2008–9.

Judit Rácz
a translator and journalist, was the translator of volumes 1–2 of Alan Walker’s Liszt biography..