24. Growing ties to Hungary.

Liszt was in Hungary when Rome fell to Victor Emmanuel’s troops in 1870, and Pius IX was besieged within the Vatican. Unable to return to Rome, Liszt languished for a while in his native land. His continued presence there led his friends and supporters to think of ways in which he might be persuaded to accept an official position. Although he wrote that he was ‘terrified of being thrown back into an active career’ (Hugo, ed., C1953, p.145) it was from this time that the bonds that already tied him to Hungary were made secure.

In June 1871 Liszt accepted the title of Royal Hungarian Counsellor from Emperor Franz Joseph. The position carried with it an annual stipend of 4000 forints and entitled Liszt to sit in the Hungarian legislature – a privilege he never used. Another distinction to come his way imposed a heavier burden. In March 1875 Liszt was appointed the first president of the newly formed National Hungarian Royal Academy of Music. This institution (which has been renamed the Liszt Academy of Music) opened its doors on 14 November 1875. Hitherto, the best Hungarian musicians had been obliged to study abroad in the absence of any institute of higher learning at home. Liszt understood that this process must be reversed in order to develop the musical life of the nation. He helped to draw up the curriculum and appoint the faculty, a task in which he was assisted by his distinguished contemporary Ferenc Erkel. He insisted that all students of composition study the piano, and all piano students study composition. Admission standards were high and each candidate was obliged to exhibit skills in improvisation, sight-reading from full score and transposition. This enlightened policy yielded rich dividends. By the end of the century Bartók, Kodály and Dohnányi, three of the country’s most prominent musicians, had already graduated from the Academy. Liszt refused to accept any remuneration for the Academy’s presidency; his rent-free apartment was the only ‘payment’ he ever received.

For the last 15 years of his life Liszt became an eternal wanderer. It has been estimated that he travelled at least 4000 miles each year – from Rome to Budapest, from Budapest to Weimar, and from Weimar back to Rome – in an endless circle, with occasional trips to Vienna, Bayreuth and Paris thrown in. That is an exceptional figure for a man in his twilight years, exposed to the rigours of road and rail in the 1870s. And it increases dramatically when we add the long journeys he made each year to the festivals of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein (whose honorary president he became in 1882) held in such scattered places as Hanover, Karlsruhe and Leipzig. This ceaseless travel is often depicted in popular biographies as proof of a restless personality driven by deep insecurities. The facts speak otherwise: Liszt’s travels were mainly a result of the demands on his time and talent by others. In Weimar it was to support Carl Alexander; in Budapest it was to help the fledgling Academy of Music; in Rome to maintain his personal loyalty to Princess Carolyne. Remove these causes and you remove the need for Liszt to have travelled at all. There was no monetary or material gain for him in any of these places, and since he invariably paid his own travel expenses, he was often out of pocket. This strained his already precarious financial situation, since he now made little money from the sale of his music, and on the rare occasions he played in public he invariably donated his services to charitable causes. The large donation he gave for the erection of the Bach monument in Eisenach in 1883 impoverished him for the better part of that year.

Liszt, Franz