Lengthy prior to Beatlemania, Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt’s live shows sparked scenes of adoration that fascinated up to they anxious. However in the back of the tales of collective hysteria lies a extra complicated fact, made up of musical virtuosity, celebrities and social prejudices.
In 1844, Berlin was once gripped via a cultural fever that critics known as “listomania.” German poet Heinrich Heine coined the time period after witnessing the just about delirious reception of Hungarian pianist and composer Franz Liszt in live performance halls throughout Europe.
The engraving that was once well-liked within the 1840s took grasp of the portray. We see ladies go out or go out, whilst others throw plants in opposition to the degree. Males, too, appear to be taken in via the pianist’s magnetism – or most likely via the response she inspires in ladies.
This engraving from the 1840s illustrates Listomania in complete swing. Theodore Hosemann/Wikimedia
Those caricatured depictions, at the side of the ceaselessly antagonistic grievance of his contemporaries, might proceed to form our cultural reminiscence of Liszt. He’s ceaselessly offered now not most effective as a musician, however as the primary fashionable famous person to reason mass hysteria.
What came about at Liszt’s live shows?
We all know so much in regards to the masses of live shows that Liszt gave within the 1830s and 1840s, due to evaluations, evaluations, lithographs and letters that he himself wrote on the time. His methods combined the works of serious composers along with his personal creative reinterpretations of works already recognized to the general public. Virtuoso items additionally showcased his outstanding mastery of the piano.
Beethoven’s sonata “Apassionata” or sonata “Pathétique” may just thus be when compared with Bach’s “Chromatic Fantasia and Fugue”, carried out in Liszt’s extraordinarily expressive taste. Franz Schubert was once represented via songs equivalent to “Erlkonig” and “Ave Maria”, which Liszt tailored for solo piano.
The paper additionally drew on the most well liked operas of its time. His “Reminiscences of Norma” (Bellini) and his “Reminiscences of Don Juan” (Mozart) remodeled acquainted melodies into large musical fantasies. Those works required each outstanding virtuosity and nice lyrical sensitivity.
Via those compositions, Liszt created actual symphonic architectures at the piano. He weaves a number of issues into coherent musical dramas, some distance from easy medleys of acquainted tunes.
Liszt ceaselessly ended his live shows with the highly regarded “Grand Galop Chromaticue”. This encore piece highlighted his talent and easiest working out of the target audience’s expectancies.
Because the critic Paul Scudo wrote in 1850:
“He is the sovereign master of his piano; he knows all its resources; he makes it speak, moan, cry, and roar under his steel fingers, which distill the nervous fluid as Volta’s battery distills the electric fluid.”
The response of his target audience steadily looked as if it would go beyond the conventions of decorum that ruled live shows and social existence on the time.
Artist and entertainer
In a sequence of essays printed in 1835 entitled At the Scenario of the Artist, Liszt portrayed musicians like himself as “artists of sound”, doomed to be misunderstood. They nonetheless have, in keeping with him, an very important challenge: “to discover, elevate and deify all the tendencies of human consciousness”.
On the similar time, George Sand’s letter displays that Liszt was once very acutely aware of the sensible realities of organizing live shows, in addition to the pitfalls of famous person. He joked that Sand can be stunned to look her identify in large letters at the Paris live performance poster. The paper acknowledges with amusement the audacity of charging 5 francs for tickets as a substitute of 3, enjoys rave evaluations, and highlights the presence of noblemen and individuals of top society amongst its target audience.
He even describes a degree coated in plants and talks in regards to the feminine consideration he gained after one among his performances, even if it gave the impression extra directed at his duet spouse. This letter unearths an artist lucid about himself, alternately amused and ambivalent in regards to the spectacle that accompanies his artwork.
Sure, Liszt performed along with his famous person standing, however he additionally obviously distanced himself from this symbol. He was once conscious that the intense size of his artwork risked being eclipsed via the worldly and sensationalist model of his persona. A lot of the tune grievance of that duration operated in precisely this fashion. It was once ceaselessly extra gossip than creative research, and plenty of columnists mentioned they have been scandalized via the depth of the reactions Liszt’s performs provoked.
Gossip and sharp feathers
Now not everybody shared the keenness of Liszt’s target audience. Some critics attacked his piano taking part in in addition to the admiration he commanded. In 1842, an creator writing beneath the pseudonym “Beta” described the blended impact of Liszt’s performances and target audience reactions in those phrases:
“The effect produced by its bizarre performance, devoid of substance and idea, sensually exciting, saturated with contrasts and fragmented, as well as the morbid enthusiasm it evokes, is a disturbing sign of stupidity, insensitivity and aesthetic emptiness of the public.”
In a similar way, the German poet Heinrich Heine instructed that Liszt’s efficiency taste was once a sparsely calculated staging supposed to impress a type of collective insanity:
“For example, when he imitated a storm on the piano, we saw lightning reflected in his face; his limbs shook as if from a storm, and long strands of hair seemed to flow, so to speak, under the downpour he represented.”
Those tales, amongst many others, contributed to shaping the mythology of “Listomania,” portraying ladies within the target audience as irrational and liable to hysteria.
The time period “mania” conveyed a scientific and pathologizing connotation, representing the keenness Liszt evoked as a type of cultural illness. Lithographs, caricatures, and anecdotal representations enhanced this efficiency, depicting spectators fainting, plants thrown on degree, and crowds attractive in habits deemed unethical.
Alternatively, those testimonies aren’t totally dependable. There have been prejudices, ethical judgments and a transparent want to dramatize the occasions. Liszt’s live shows have been, due to this fact, on the intersection of a number of phenomena: peculiar artistry and virtuosity, spectacles that provide public reactions and media narratives filtered via gossip, exaggeration and ethical panic with hints of gender.
As such, “Listomania” prefigures the mechanisms of contemporary famous person. (It additionally impressed what one critic known as “the most shameful historical film ever made.”)
In the similar approach that artists just like the Beatles, Beyoncé or Taylor Swift generate intense fervor whilst being the topic of slander and sensationalist remedy, Franz Liszt’s famous person was once inseparable from each the admiration he impressed and the venomous assaults of his detractors.
