The Liszt Report

The Liszt biography, by Oliver Hilmes, wasn't chosen because he's a favourite composer. He wouldn't make any Top 30 of mine, Top 50 I don't know. CD1 from the set of 9 by Jorge     Bolet was missing so the seller refunded half of the bargain price, they have their moments, some of it possibly a bit lyrically inconsequential but the dramtic parts are the sort of music best heard live.

No, the interest in the biography was the story and it doesn't let us down. It's possible that the family arrangements and succession of relationships and their difficulties dominate too much but they are the story. Having arrived at the episode featuring Olga Janina, the stalker who carries a revolver and poisons, I've stopped at a cliff-hanging phrase that, 

The worst was yet to come. 

Few give much credence to Liszt's time spent in holy orders which may or may not have been an unsuccessful ruse to gain employment in The Vatican rather than any renouncement of his very successful campaign of amorous involvements. And they went on throughout the family.

His daughter, Cosima, moves on in premptory fashion from her first husband to Richard Wagner but it's not always clear who, if any of them, are worthy of our sympathy as the Romantic age builds towards its greatest excesses. 

These are not 'ordinary people', most of them come with titles from the apparently vast ranks of European aristocracy, whether real or fake - Olga Janina was not the Russian countess she claimed to be. Liszt's daughter, Marie von Sayn-Wittgenstein marries Prince Konstantin Victor Ernst Emil Karl Alexander Friedrich Prince zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfurst, for example. 

It would be more reassuring if any of the tremendous talent, money and appetite for liaisons made any of thyem happy for any length of time but Romantics, it seems, have even less capacity for happiness than any other generation of creative artists and determine to cause themselves as much anguish as they can conjure. In hoping for a roller-coaster ride of sensations and drama, Liszt's story lived up to all expectations as well as confirming the prejudice that Byron was only the first of many who were 'mad, bad and dangerous to know'.