5. Contacts with Parisian society.

Liszt became acquainted with a number of musical contemporaries at this time, including Berlioz, Chopin, Alkan, Hiller and others. His first encounter with Berlioz took place a few months after the July Revolution. He attended the first performance of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique in the company of the composer (5 December 1830), and shortly afterwards produced his piano transcription of the unpublished score. (Liszt’s transcription was published in 1834, while Berlioz’s orchestral score did not appear until 1845; Schumann’s famous review of the work in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik was based on Liszt’s piano score.) A warm friendship developed between the pair which lasted for more than 20 years before entering a long decline. While Berlioz speaks of Liszt with affection in his Mémoires, and regarded him as unrivalled as a pianist, he was more cautious of his compositions; with the passing years his lukewarm attitude to Liszt’s orchestral works, together with the latter’s growing support of Wagner, caused the friendship to languish.

Another meeting was with Chopin, who arrived in Paris as a refugee from Warsaw in the autumn of 1831. Liszt attended Chopin’s début at the Salle Pleyel on 26 February 1832, and even appeared on the same platform as Chopin on 3 April and 15 December. Chopin cemented these early connections by dedicating his set of 12 Etudes op.10 to Liszt. Nevertheless, the idea of a great friendship between Liszt and Chopin is unsubstantiated. Chopin soon came to dislike what he perceived to be Liszt’s theatricality and his striving after effect. After 1835 Liszt lived mainly abroad and the two composers barely saw one another. Since Chopin died in 1849, he never lived to appreciate the more mature Liszt of later years.

Paganini made his Paris début in March 1831, but Liszt was on a prolonged visit to Switzerland and did not hear him until his next appearance there in April 1832. In a famous letter to his pupil Pierre-Etienne Wolff, Liszt recorded some of his impressions: ‘What a man, what a violin, what an artist! Heavens! What sufferings, what misery, what tortures in those four strings!’ (Briefe, C1893–1905, i, 6–8). The letter is especially interesting because of the music examples Liszt includes to indicate those violinistic devices which had particularly caught his ear. The musical influence of Paganini cannot be overstated. One immediate outcome was the fantasy on La clochette (1833), the theme of which was used by Paganini in the finale of his B minor Concerto, and which bristles with difficulties. The six Etudes d’exécution transcendante d’après Paganini followed (1838–40), based on the Italian master’s formidable caprices for solo violin, and containing pianistic textures of terrifying complexity.

Liszt, Franz

6. Marie d’Agoult.

In the Paris of the 1830s the salon was the centre of intellectual and artistic life. Here mingled all the radical ideas of post-Revolutionary France. The fashionable hostesses of the stately homes of the Faubourgs St-Germain and St-Honoré vied with one another to entertain the most interesting personalities. Among the writers were Sainte-Beuve, Hugo, Balzac and George Sand; the painters included Delacroix, Devéria and Ary Scheffer. Soon this volatile mixture was enriched by a flood of refugees from Warsaw, including Chopin and the Polish nationalist poet Mickiewicz. Merely to call the roll is to name many of the leaders of the Romantic movement itself. This was the milieu in which the young Liszt developed many of his abiding notions about music and its relationship with the other arts.

Towards the end of 1832 Liszt was introduced to Countess Marie d’Agoult, the woman who was to become his lover, bear him three children and share his life for the next 12 years. Marie was 28; Liszt was 22. She was unhappily married to an older husband by whom she already had two daughters, Louise and Claire. Her marriage to Count Charles d’Agoult, a French cavalry officer, had taken place on 27 May 1827, before a glittering assembly in the fashionable Church of the Assumption, and the marriage contract had been witnessed by Charles X. Five years later the union was dead in all but name, and when Liszt met her Marie was living an independent life. Born Marie-Catherine-Sophie de Flavigny, she was descended from the powerful Bethmann family of Frankfurt, which had built up a fortune through its banking enterprises. There is no evidence that the Bethmanns were Jewish, despite their name and much debate on the matter. It was Bethmann money that paid for Marie’s dowry and helped her to buy her palatial home, the Château de Croissy, which lay 9 km outside Paris.

At first Liszt and Marie took pains to keep their liaison secret. Throughout 1833 and 1834 they arranged various trysts – sometimes at his cramped bachelor apartment in Paris (jocularly referred to by them as the ‘Ratzenloch’ – or rat-hole), and sometimes at Croissy. The fact that they were apart for much of this time generated a clandestine correspondence (first published in 1933–4) which provides clear evidence of the turbulent nature of the relationship. Whether under normal circumstances Marie would ever have abandoned hearth and home for Liszt is a matter of debate. In December 1834, however, Marie’s six-year-old daughter Louise died, and that precipitated a crisis. Marie became suicidal and threatened to drown herself. She travelled to Paris, was reunited with Liszt, and became his lover in the full physical sense. That must have been no later than March 1835; their first daughter, Blandine-Rachel, was born in December of that year.

Liszt, Franz