2 Inventing Liszt’s life: early biography

and autobiography
a l e x a n d e r re h d i n g

In what has become a famous letter to Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-

Wittgenstein, dated 13 August 1856, Liszt described himself as ‘one half
gypsy, the other Franciscan’.1 In a sense, he was being modest. One can
easily expand the hallmarks of his scintillating public persona into an array
of conflicting images: the flashy virtuoso versus the profound symphonic
composer, the irresistible sex god versus the ascetic Catholic priest, the Hun-
garian nationalist versus the European cosmopolitan. All the facets in this
kaleidoscope of images seem to sit side by side in peaceful coexistence, in
spite and because of their apparently contradictory nature.
In this situation it goes without saying that modern Liszt biographers
have habitually bemoaned the sheer impossibility of the task of painting an
authentic picture of the charismatic musician: his character simply seems
to be too complex, too evasive to be captured by biographical methods.
Thus Alan Walker, Liszt’s most authoritative modern biographer, opens his
three-volume work with a sigh:

The normal way biography is written is to allow the basic materials – letters,
diaries, manuscripts – to disclose the life. And if those materials are missing,
one goes out and finds them. That did not happen with Liszt. Because of the
unparalleled fame, even notoriety, enjoyed by Liszt during his lifetime
(eclipsing by far that of all his musical contemporaries), a complete reversal
of the ‘normal’ process took place. People clamoured for literature about
him. And so the biographies came first; the hard evidence turned up later.2

In fact, one might well say that biography determined Liszt’s life right from
the beginning of his professional life. The fascination with Liszt’s character
was such that biographers hardly allowed Liszt to live his life before it was
turned into a text. The first ‘biographical study’ was published as early as
1835, when Liszt was all of twenty-three years old.3 And by the time he
died, in 1886, the number of biographies had already swollen to extensive
proportions: besides a number of more or less scholarly books that addressed
themselves strictly to biographical matters, the market was flooded with
reminiscences, memoirs and romans-à-clef surrounding Liszt.
It was those latter accounts, highly personal and often sensationalist, that
[14] invariably set the tone for Liszt biography and contributed to the complexity

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 15 Inventing Liszt’s life

of Liszt’s public image. His former mistress Marie d’Agoult published her
memoirs of Liszt in 1846 under the title Nélida (a re-feminising anagram of
the Christian name of her male nom de plume Daniel Stern), while the hot-
blooded, self-styled ‘Cossack Countess’, known as Olga Janina, published
her suitably melodramatic reminiscences under the title Souvenirs d’une
cosaque (1874). This was followed by a sequel, which was supposed to appear
as though written as a response by Liszt himself, entitled Les mémoirs d’un
pianiste. Janina’s first pseudonym, Robert Franz, was an unfortunate choice,
since it also happened to be the name of a composer in the circle around
Franz Liszt, which must have caused some confusion; for a further sequel,
Les amours d’une cosaque par un ami de l’Abbé ‘X’ ou le roman du pianiste et de
la cosaque, she assumed the name of Sylvia Zorelli. Many a Liszt biographer
has regretted that the best-known examples of Liszt biographies stemmed
from the quill of his spurned lovers; the image drawn in these works seems
surprisingly resilient to revisionist attempts.
While the partly mystifying, partly slanderous accounts presented in
these romans-à-clef paint a somewhat manipulated picture of Liszt – thus
‘tainting’ his image, as Walker has it4 – it would be erroneous to claim that
they have nothing to do with Liszt and his biography. For, at the very least,
these sensationalist and personal views, which helped to sustain an interest in
Liszt, suggested the tantalising possibility not only that this very public artist
had a private side, but also that this private side might just be available. No
one has captured this better than Ken Russell, in whose film Lisztomania –
which takes its title from a genuine nineteenth-century term coined by
no less a figure than Heinrich Heine to describe the fanatic cult sur-
rounding Liszt – the pianist transforms into a scintillating nineteenth-
century rock star (and one strangely scintillating in the style of the 1970s at
that).
What would seem to be missing in this flood of accounts of Liszt’s life is
any sign of his own authoritative voice. Lina Ramann’s epochal biography,
Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch (1880–94), was, in its own way, an
attempt to set the record straight. In doing the research for her biography, she
applied a rigorous scientific apparatus: she sent out a series of questionnaires
to Liszt directly, to obtain what she considered to be the most authoritative
answers possible. In this way she hoped to arrive at an objective picture of
the great man’s life and, ideally, to dispose of any such speculations as might
have been fanned by the insinuations of previous biographers. A diary entry
of 12 June 1875 reads:

I have many biographical things to overturn and to correct: Gustav Schilling

[author of an 1844 biography] has committed many a sin – writing a story
instead of history. I had based my own work on his in several places, now

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 16 Alexander Rehding

my work is a mess, and have to cut out whole passages on which I had spent
great effort.5

This latter part of Ramann’s project, to dispel the myths surrounding Liszt,
was perhaps the least successful, despite the rigour and scientific objectivity
she apparently brought to bear on her project. This was, in no small part, due
to the long-living nature of legend, which is often so much more seductive
and engaging than real life. But what is more, Ramann in turn added her
own brand of hero-worship – though by no means out of the ordinary in
nineteenth-century biographical style – in describing Liszt’s achievements
and character in the most glowing terms. It is not surprising that Ramann’s
work has long been criticised in turn for myth-making, and she herself has
only recently begun to be reappraised as a scholar and biographer.6

I
Liszt is reported to have been angered by biographical inaccuracies. For
most of his life, he was in the habit of correcting his biographies in the
margins of the copies he read.7 However, one must ask nonetheless, if Liszt
was bothered by this to such an extent that he would correct errors in private,
why he kept these corrections to himself. Indeed, one might even ask, why
did he not write an autobiography himself in order to end the myths and
rumours once and for all?
He would have had every opportunity and incentive to do so. Liszt’s
publishers, in any case, would have been all in favour of it, not least because
they were only too aware that his autobiography would easily be a bestseller.
In fact, so vehement was their insistence that Liszt complained in a letter in
1882: ‘I have often been asked by publishers to write my memoirs. I refused
them, saying that it was quite enough for me to live my life, let alone to
commit it to paper.’8
This might seem like a good enough answer for refusing to write an
autobiography. But if we ponder his position a little longer, it turns out
that this position does not quite add up. True, we might well agree that by
1882, as a septuagenarian, Liszt was too old to write himself – he had all but
ceased his publishing activities by 1859. However, Liszt’s letter continues by
pointing out that the situation would be different if he were married: in that
case, he would happily ask his wife to support him in such an enterprise.9
(This practice would not have been entirely new to him, given that most of
his prose works seem to have been ghost-written by, or at least dictated to,
whoever was his girlfriend at the time.10 ) Again, this seems like a reasonable

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 17 Inventing Liszt’s life

argument until one probes it a little more: there is no real reason why he
should not entertain the notion of using anyone else’s secretarial services –
all the more so if we consider that at the same time Liszt had no objections to
having his biography written by someone else, namely Lina Ramann. And,
as noted before, Ramann’s exuberant style and obvious devotion to Liszt in
turn introduced a number of deviations from the objective account that she
had set out to write – some of which Liszt proceeded, as was his wont, to
correct in the margins of his own copy.
With this point we have arrived back at square one, and the insight that
if Liszt indeed wanted a reliable biographical account that would satisfy
his apparent dislike for factual errors, he would have to write one himself.
However, this circuitous route opens up an alternative scenario for Liszt’s
factual corrections: it is notable that the corrections he made tended to be in
his private copy and – even in Ramann’s case – not in the published version
that was circulated and would have been read by the public. Is it possible
that while Liszt wanted to distinguish between the truth and fiction, he was
happy for the public to live in a state suspended in between?
To these observations regarding his refusal to write an autobiography, a
further query can be added if we take seriously Liszt’s artistic motto génie
oblige, with which he concludes his article on Paganini and which became
something of a personal motto for him.11 For one of the key obligations of the
genius in the later nineteenth century was in fact to write an autobiography.
Witness the important 1881 article on ‘autobiography’ by Virginia Woolf’s
father Leslie Stephen. He begins his argument with a good dose of Victorian
common sense:

Nobody ever wrote a dull autobiography. If one may make such a bull, the
very dullness would be interesting. The autobiographer has ex officio two
qualifications of supreme importance in all literary work. He is writing
about a topic in which he is keenly interested, and about a topic upon which
he is the highest living authority.12

At the same time, however, Stephen’s Victorian ebullience about the inherent
excellence of autobiography had to be taken with a pinch of salt. Follow-
ing other contemporary views, it is not up to just anybody to write their
autobiography. Thus, the author of an article on ‘Famous Autobiographies’,
published anonymously, as was common, in the Edinburgh Review of 1911,
added a note of caution: ‘No man, but the greatest, can write a thoroughly
good autobiography.’13 These two positions would appear to be at logger-
heads with one another, but it is actually possible to combine their respective
points. Put together, they present us with what amounts to a tautology of

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 18 Alexander Rehding

greatness and autobiography in the later nineteenth century, which can be

summed up in the following syllogism:

1. Autobiography is invariably a good read.

2. Only a truly great person can write a good autobiography.
3. Therefore everybody who writes an autobiography must be a truly great
person.

In this concise form, such a view would of course be absurd, but there is
something to be said for the self-sustaining nature of autobiography and
greatness, especially in the context of the genius cult during the late nine-
teenth century. In an intellectual climate that holds, in one way or another,
that history manifests itself in the deeds of great individuals – heroes indeed –
autobiography has a very particular role to fulfil.
Stephen holds up the belief that the genius in particular needs to con-
vey the story of his life to the wider public, as his example forms, in
Stephen’s view, the very basis of the social fabric. Or, in the words of a recent
commentator: ‘The autobiographies of “great men” become the authentic
data which shores up cultural certainties and provides the points between
which the map of Western civilisation is drawn.’14 This strand of thought,
that great individuals have the right and indeed the duty to inform pos-
terity about their exceptional lives, pervades the entire history of modern
autobiography, at least from Benvenuto Cellini onwards.
In fact, the Victorian confidence in autobiography is fostered, on the one
hand, by a Spencerian faith in the progressive perfectibility of mankind, and
on the other, by the belief that autobiography allows pure and unmediated
access to the thoughts of the great man. In a word, the later nineteenth
century perceived autobiography as pure authenticity, as unmediated access
to the truth about greatness for the benefit of all of mankind.15
All the more reason, then, to wonder why Liszt shied away from this
obligation of genius. In fact, his own views on the possibilities of biography –
and by extension, autobiography – turn the circularity of our model into its
vantage point. In other words, while Stephen’s insistence on the authenticity
of autobiography confidently assumed a one-on-one mapping of life onto
autobiographical text, it is also possible to take the opposite stance and
consider the crevices between the two layers of life and biography. However,
as soon as life and biography no longer match each other, this would lead
us down the road of fiction.
There is, of course, a great autobiographical tradition of doing just that,
which was particularly associated with the Romantic movement of the earlier
part of the century – witness works such as Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit
(Fiction and Truth), Jean Paul’s somewhat obscure Conjectural Autobiog-
raphy, which, rather than looking back, outlines the following forty years

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 19 Inventing Liszt’s life

of his future life, or indeed Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus. All of these
works – all by favourite authors of Liszt – deliberately blur the boundaries
between fact and fiction. The title of Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus, or ‘The Tailor
Redressed’, even makes reference to the enormous scope for self-refashioning
and self-reinvention that autobiography offers.
All these works effectively question the assumptions that Stephen made
about the significance and function of autobiography. In particular, they
pick up on this chasm between those two strata of life and autobiography,
and in this way explore the precarious position of the genre on the borderline
between authenticity and fiction.16 The commonplace relationship between
life and autobiography, namely that life engenders the autobiography, would
have to be rethought.17 As Jean Paul’s conjectural autobiography suggests
above all, the opposite may also be true: the autobiographical project may
in turn produce and determine life. Perhaps, pace Walker, this reversal is the
‘normal’ way for Liszt’s biography after all?

II
It is in this context that we have to consider Liszt’s own views of biography
and life. In an astonishing letter to his official biographer Lina Ramann,
Liszt effectively gave her licence to let her imagination run wild. He wrote:
‘My biography is more to be invented than to be written after the fact’
(‘Meine Biographie ist mehr zu erfinden denn nachzuschreiben’).18 Liszt’s
acknowledgement that life and biography are not identical, and need not
be so, makes no claims to authenticity – at least not in Stephen’s sense – but
rather resonates with the full possibilities of re-fashioning and redressing.
In this situation, where the commonplace link between life and biography
is questioned and biographical access to ‘life’ proper is effectively denied,
Liszt biographers have occasionally tried to revert to his compositions as
the backbone of his biography. This idea, whose origin clearly hails from
romantic music aesthetics, dwells on the notion that a higher authenticity
can be found in Liszt’s musical utterings, and has become something of a
trope in Liszt scholarship:

[A]n enormous amount of his music was confessional – in a way, the

autobiography he didn’t write. It all seems to be there: landscapes observed,
airs overheard; erotic and religious experience, poetry and history, treasures
and trash. It wouldn’t be difficult to draw a picture of his life from his music
alone.19

The idea that music should provide some sort of stability in light of the
biographical licence Liszt gave to Ramann may be comforting; yet it is at

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 20 Alexander Rehding

least debatable how successfully such a purely musical biography could be

conveyed. At the same time, the idea of using Liszt’s music, as a kind of
public statement with which he would like to see his audiences engage,
might prove a fruitful starting point for a form of autobiography – as a
decidedly confessional and public act.
The particular notion of autobiography that I want to explore in this
essay shares a few features with this romantic notion of a ‘biography-in-
sounds’ insofar as it would also not take the conventional form of a book.
Beyond that, however, the two part company: it would not seek biography as
immanent in compositions, but rather in the circumstances in which these
compositions might function as autobiographical acts. This form of auto-
biography manifests itself much more in an abstract relationship between
Liszt, as he choreographs his own life in and through his music, and his audi-
ence, which ‘reads’, in a broad sense, these events and may interpret them as
biographically relevant. In other words, certain events may obtain autobi-
ographical significance if the audience acknowledges the identity between
two personae – Liszt (1), the author, and narrator of his own life, and Liszt
(2), the composed subject of this narration – and in this way authenticates
the autobiographical significance of this event.
What I have in mind here are certain autobiographical moments, events
around Liszt’s person, that attained autobiographical status. Liszt unde-
niably lived those moments, experienced them, but seemed at the same
time to have been anxious to choreograph them so that they would be
received by his adoring audience in the correct spirit. Indeed, this con-
cept of autobiography – as a relationship between Liszt and his ‘readers’,
the concert-going public – might go a long way to explaining why he so
adamantly refused to write down his memoirs: ‘It is enough for me to live
my life, let alone to commit it to paper.’ With our sharpened sensitivities
to the precarious nature of the phrase ‘my life’, which has become detached
from what may be committed to paper, we should prick up our ears at
this statement. (The literal translation from the German ‘to live through my
life’, or ‘mein Leben zu durchleben’, is more emphatic than the English.)
We are now in a position to understand that Liszt had no interest in writ-
ing down his life; in a way, he had done this already in this performative
fashion of autobiography, and therefore needed no longer to ‘commit it to
paper’.
Although an exhaustive analysis would be beyond the scope of this chap-
ter, I would suggest that it was only thanks to this performative mode of
autobiography, suggesting an incontestable immediacy and authoritative
authenticity, which is at once fiction and fact, that Liszt succeeded in por-
traying the many biographical images of himself – priest and Don Juan,
shallow virtuoso and deep thinker – without tripping up in their inherent

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 21 Inventing Liszt’s life

contradictions. In short, that which would be too incredible for fiction

becomes possible ‘in life’.

III
The autobiographical moment I want to discuss here, by way of illustration,
is the moment of transformation from his virtuoso career to his second
career as a self-consciously great composer. This event was the unveiling
of the Beethoven monument at Bonn on 10–13 August 1845, which was
among the first public statues dedicated to a composer in Germany.20
In 1845 Liszt enjoyed European-wide fame as a piano virtuoso. It was no
doubt on account of his celebrity status that Liszt was invited to participate
in the celebrations for the unveiling of the monument, although some cynics
were quick to point out that Liszt’s donation of 10,000 francs might have
also had something to do with it. The donation covered almost a quarter of
the overall cost and ensured that Liszt was constantly in the limelight of the
four-day celebrations.21
In the end, Liszt performed in no fewer than five functions: he was the
chief donor; he was appointed an honorary member of the organising
committee; he was commissioned to play the solo part of Beethoven’s Fifth
Piano Concerto; was commissioned to conduct part of the festival’s con-
certs; and last but not least, was commissioned to compose a festival cantata.
This cantata was one of only two commissioned compositions for the cele-
brations – the other being a Festival Ode by the president of the committee
and university director of music, Heinrich Karl Breidenstein.
It must be remembered that the sheer size of the celebrations, involv-
ing almost three thousand guests, was no mean feat in the mid-nineteenth
century: the most famous musicians of Europe, not to mention the inter-
national press – all would be present in provincial Bonn to celebrate the
dead composer. In short, everybody knew that the unveiling of the Bonn
monument to the great man was an occasion to make (or break) a musical
career.22
In this competitive, sometimes outright hostile climate, Liszt’s involve-
ment was not universally appreciated. He was, after all, only a piano virtu-
oso – a position which for all its glamour always smacked of charlatanism,
superficiality and immorality – while he had virtually no reputation as a
conductor or composer. Anton Schindler, for instance, always intent on
protecting Beethoven’s heritage from the meddling of others, engaged in a
veritable media war against Liszt:

Far be it from me, neither to the pleasure of some nor the displeasure of
others . . . to put a sordino, that is: a damper on to the excessive racket about

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 22 Alexander Rehding

Mr. Liszt. The truth must in any case be weightier than ten thousand
francs . . . However, some gentlemen in Bonn bow their knee before [this
sum of money], because its sound is just the kind that affixes itself best to
their aural nerves.23

One particular event surrounding Liszt must have irked Schindler: in 1823,
the 11-year-old Liszt had been introduced to Beethoven by none other than
Schindler himself and played the piano before the composer. Beethoven
had apparently been so enraptured by the performance that he had stormed
onto the stage and had kissed the young Liszt on the forehead.24 Liszt is
known to have attached great significance to Beethoven’s ‘kiss of consecra-
tion’, or Weihekuß, which was soon stylised into a symbolic act. Schindler
felt threatened, and tried to undermine Liszt’s position. He even sank so
low as to forge Beethoven’s conversation books to evoke the impression
that Beethoven had disliked Liszt.25 (A forgery, by the way, that was not
discovered for 120 years.)
The cherished and well-documented event in the biography of Liszt was
the key to this ‘autobiographical moment’, as it allowed him to consolidate
his reputation as Beethoven’s consecrated heir. This famous episode was
particularly played out in the events surrounding the commissioned festival
cantata. Such a festival commission was a delicate task, as the spectacular
failure of Breidenstein’s Ode shows. The critic of the Wiener Allgemeine
Musik-Zeitung, which may count as representative of the international press
in this instance, did not mince his words when he gave the work the thumbs
down:

Even though Herr Breidenstein may have had the understandable wish, as
the president of the committee, as the local director of music, to occupy
himself during the festival, he should never force his compositions on us,
where [famous composers such as] Spohr, Lindpaintner, etc. were present at
the festival. As surely every modest man would have done when asked to
compose a festive chorus, Herr Breidenstein would have done well to refuse
the honour, which ought only to be made available to the oldest of the
foremost living German composers.26

It should be added, in all fairness, that Breidenstein had greatly annoyed

the journalists by refusing to hand out free tickets to the international press,
which would certainly have added to the negative impression of Breiden-
stein’s composition. Yet the Viennese critic is making an important point: it
is not up to just anyone to honour Beethoven, the person doing the honour-
ing is by implication valorised as worthy of fulfilling such an office. There
is a certain reciprocity at work, which could be described concisely with
a slightly changed version of a Goethean bon mot: ‘He who commends,

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 23 Inventing Liszt’s life

condescends.’ (In fact, Goethe himself is more lenient: ‘Wer lobt, stellt sich
gleich.’)
Liszt’s festival cantata, by contrast, won almost unanimous praise. Here
is our Viennese critic again:

Even though the composition on the whole lacks some unified form, as well
as some unified idea, it is still possible to discern something extraordinary
in the totality of the composition . . . I consider this work not only as one of
the most interesting in Liszt’s oeuvre, but in the field of contemporary
composition on the whole. With this work, Liszt has raised great
expectations for the future.27

What had happened? How come Liszt was worthy where Breidenstein
had been blasphemous? As we have already seen, from Liszt’s perspective, the
Beethoven commemoration offered a unique opportunity to round off and
consolidate his reputation as Beethoven’s consecrated heir,28 which allowed
him to build on his international fame as a brilliant virtuoso to become
a serious (that is: great) composer. However, this only explains half of the
story.
There is also a specific musical reason that his cantata was accepted where
Breidenstein’s had failed. Liszt had in fact employed a very clever compo-
sitional device: he had used a quotation from Beethoven’s very popular
‘Archduke’ Trio in B
major. Liszt’s version first introduces it as a chorale,
a kind of ‘secular Sanctus’,29 in praise of Beethoven, and follows some of
the variations that Beethoven himself composed. However, finally he mon-
umentalises the theme in a concluding apotheosis: where the original is an
intimate piece of chamber music, Liszt’s final version, significantly marked
Andante religioso, blows the theme up into gigantic proportions, played fff
by the grand symphony orchestra with chorus, to the words ‘Hail, hail,
Beethoven!’
It is of course more than a coincidence that the orchestral and vocal
forces of the Cantata for the Inauguration of the Bonn Beethoven Monument
are virtually identical with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. With this artistic
ploy, Liszt was not put in the awkward position of condescending to praise
Beethoven. On the contrary, audience and critics registered it as a graceful
bow towards the master. Liszt let Beethoven speak for himself, and praise
himself. Or so it would seem, because – as in Breidenstein’s failed attempt
earlier – the praise is always reciprocal. It is none other than Liszt’s later
biographer Ramann who best captures the inherent ambiguity, when she
writes: ‘With this device, he had characterised the essence of the genius of
Beethoven and glorified it as though through himself.’ Through Beethoven’s
genius or Liszt’s, one should ask – which would seem precisely the point.
Liszt may have appeared to let Beethoven speak for himself, but what really

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 Example 2.1 Liszt, Beethoven Cantata no. 1. Andante religioso

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 25 Inventing Liszt’s life

happened was that Liszt cleverly used Beethoven’s voice from beyond the
grave to let the dead composer speak out for him.
What makes this event an autobiographical moment is not the simple
fact of the quotation from Beethoven. It would certainly be misguided to
claim that any musical quotation is automatically an act of autobiograph-
ical self-refashioning. Rather, what is crucial about the autobiographical
moment is the context in which it occurred, which allowed the split into
Liszt (1) the composer, that is the narrator of his biography, and Liszt (2) the
composed self, the subject of his own narration. The audience is encouraged
to assume that these two are the same person, as we have seen is common
in autobiography, but we can only understand the underlying mechanisms
if we finely distinguish between the two.
What in fact happened at the unveiled Beethoven memorial was that
Liszt (1), the composer-narrator, assumed Beethoven’s voice, to allow Liszt
(2), the subject of the narrative, to enter the Beethovenian lineage. This
autobiographical split was possible only in this particular situation. (In this
sense, a subsequent performance of the same work in Paris under Habeneck
had practically no autobiographical interest.)
If it were possible to pinpoint a moment in Liszt’s life that was the start-
ing point of his career as a self-consciously great composer, it would be
this day, 13 August 1845. With this moment, Liszt consciously stepped into
the sublime symphonic tradition for which Beethoven was remembered in
the mid-nineteenth century.30 With the cantata of 1845, with this autobio-
graphical moment, then, Liszt had transformed his career from the image
of the flashy virtuoso to that of the serious composer, apparently anointed
by Beethoven himself.

IV
But if the cantata was instrumental in Liszt’s autobiographical re-fashioning,
it should be examined in a little more detail, as it can tell us more about
the biographical status of this work. We should therefore return to Liszt’s
motto génie oblige.
The libretto of the cantata was written by the now all-but-forgotten Jena
poet O. F. Bernhard Wolff, to whom Liszt had been introduced in Thuringia
a few years previously. Liszt was quite interested in the text and commented
on it in a letter of 1845:

At least the text [of the Bonn Beethoven Cantata] is rather novel; it is a kind
of Magnificat to the human genius seized by God in eternal revelation
across time and space. The text could just as well be applied to Goethe, or
Raphael, or Columbus as to Beethoven.31

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 26 Alexander Rehding

However, if the precise name of the genius is unspecified, his list might also be
extended to include Liszt himself. This would be of considerable significance,
as it became more and more apparent in mid-nineteenth-century culture –
and nowhere more so than in music history since Beethoven’s death – that
the rise of the genius also implied, as its negative counterpart, the epigone.32
At the same time, the public discourse about the genius had changed sub-
stantially over the course of the nineteenth century. As our Victorian com-
mentators initially underlined, the genius came to occupy a more and more
public position in the national imagination. In fact, the second movement
of Liszt’s Beethoven Cantata spells out the particular demands on the genius
in nineteenth-century nationalistic historiography:

If the Prince represents his people

In subsequent annals,
Who represents their pain,
Who announces how they suffered?
Who rises up for them in the book of World History?
Makes their name radiate across the course of times?
Poor Mankind, cruel fate!
Who is sent out by you at the end of the day?
The Genius!
Eternally great in his works!33

It is important to note that Wolff’s text withholds Beethoven’s name until

the very end of the work. In Liszt’s setting, by contrast, all these pressing
questions are answered by the quotation from the ‘Archduke’ Trio, which
succeeds the chorus’s lengthy extolments of the genius. In this way, Liszt’s
setting specified the answer that the libretto had left open in this general way,
and made explicit reference to Beethoven. However, since he had composed
himself into the Cantata, as we have seen, the work also made reference
to himself. The carte blanche that the cantata text offered was now dou-
bly filled with Liszt the new genius-composer, besides Beethoven the dead
genius.
In this way, Liszt was able to fulfil his self-imposed obligation, expressed
in his motto génie oblige. He had written an autobiography, and a very public
one at that. In doing so, he had not only established his position as a great
composer, not an epigone, but had also assumed the public responsibilities of
the genius. In other words, with this autobiographical moment, constructed
by and for the public, Liszt had written himself into the hall of fame of
musical geniuses, alongside Beethoven.
It is perhaps no coincidence that in the only strictly autobiographical
document of Liszt that has come down to us, an entry for a biographical
encyclopedia of 1881 – the year before Liszt explained his refusal to write an

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 27 Inventing Liszt’s life

autobiography – the Beethoven statue plays a prominent role. In fact, when

Liszt was sent the proofs, he corrected them in his usual fashion; Liszt’s
first substantial addition to the text is: ‘He has notably contributed to the
monument for Beethoven erected at Bonn in 1845.’34 It is one of the rare
moments in Liszt’s biography when he confirms in writing, and expressly
lets the public know, that this event had a particular significance for him.
Whether it was the significance ascribed to this event in this essay, we can –
and should – but guess.

Cambridge
https://doi.org/10.1017/CCOL9780521622042.003 Companions
Published Online ©
online by Cambridge Cambridge
University Press University Press, 2011