Franz Liszt Research Articles

Franz Liszt’s Album d’un voyageur: music, memorials, and the Anthropocene

In June 1835, while awaiting the birth of their first child, Franz Liszt and his partner, Marie d’Agoult, eloped to Switzerland. The couple knew Switzerland offered them a better chance than France...

William Wallace (1860-1940): British ophthalmologist and classical music composer.

William Wallace (1860-1940) received the degrees MB, MCh, and MD from the University of Glasgow, and qualified as an ophthalmologist in 1888. Even as he was training in eye surgery, he was already composing music, and Wallace became more attracted to the ear than to the eye and abandoned medicine to become a classical music composer. He never practiced ophthalmology after 1889, except during First World War when he volunteered to serve in the Royal Army Medical Corps. He studied briefly at the Royal Academy of Music in London, but was mostly self-taught. Wallace was influenced by the music of Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner, and thus became a champion for late Romantic music. He wrote many types of music: his most successful were symphonic or tone poems. He was a playwright, music critic, translator, artist, and advocate for composers' copyright interests in Parliament. After the War, he never again composed but held important positions in organized music such as Professor of Harmony and Composition at the Royal Academy of Music. Only about 30% of his compositions were performed or published in his lifetime, but recently, there has been increased interest in performing and recording his music.

Death and Resurrection Motifs in Narratives of Berlioz’s and Liszt’s Lives: D’Ortigue, Ramann, and Berlioz’s Mémoires

ABSTRACTThe ways in which biographers mythologize their subjects’ lives (and the way they mythologize their own lives) have long been a topic of research in life-writing. Even though several musicologists have identified mythologizing “motifs,” the mythologizing function of “death” and “resurrection” remains under-theorized in relation to musical biography. Such motifs appear in biographies of Berlioz and Liszt written during their lifetimes, beginning with the earliest biographies of the composers, which were written by a friend, the music critic Joseph d’Ortigue. The meanings of these episodes changed when they appeared in auto/biographies written towards the end of their lives: Berlioz’s Mémoires and Lina Ramann’s Franz Liszt als Künstler und Mensch (the first “official” biography of Liszt, written partly under his guidance). In both of d’Ortigue’s biographical sketches, “resurrection” is associated with the broader social regeneration taking place in Paris in the wake of the July 1830 Revolution, thereby magnifying the composers’ importance. The ability to understand and conquer death is also positioned as an integral part of the composers’ apprenticeships, further inflating and mythologizing their status as artists.

Torquato Tasso på (kryds og) tværs

The article contributes to research into the topos of furor poeticus or poetic madness and its prominence during the romantic period. In particular, it compares how the life story of the mad Italian poet from the Renaissance, Torquato Tasso, was represented in fictionalized versions across media and art forms. Romantic versions of Tasso’s life in drama (Wolfgang Goethe and B. S. Ingemann), poetry (Lord Byron), painting (Eugène Delacroix) and instrumental music (Franz Liszt) are analyzed with the aim of highlighting which aspects of Tasso’s life are portrayed, how the affordances of the medium affect the depiction and how intermedial references and transpositions are in play. In addition to intermediality theory, the transmedial narratology of Werner Wolf is introduced and employed to compare to what degree the different media and art forms can convey prototypical aspects of narrativity. Moving from the most prototypical to the least prototypical narrative genre, the article finds that the more representations of Tasso focus on his time spent in a madhouse, the more the narrative stresses experientiality at the expense of investment in plot development. The affordances of strong narrative media and strong and weak narrative-inducing media may highlight different aspects of the experientiality of furor poeticus, but in all cases the representation of Tasso is performed in an innovative romantic style.

Franz Liszt's Heir: Ferruccio Busoni and Weimar

When Franz Liszt died, the world lost an innovative composer, mentor, and pianist. Although his influence did not die with him, few of his successors can claim to have walked in his footsteps – to have lived and taught in the same rooms – and to have shared many of his ideals. Ferruccio Busoni did just that when the Grand Duke Carl Alexander invited him to hold piano master classes in Weimar in 1900 and 1901, just as he had invited Liszt to do nearly two decades earlier (1881–1885).This article shows how Liszt's activities in Weimar as Pedagogue and as Kapellmeister (1848–1861) became models for Busoni as he sought to position himself as a prominent ‘musical polymath’ at the turn of the century. Yet Busoni not only emulated Liszt, he also promoted him in an age when the older composer was considered of only tangential importance.By producing authoritative editions of Liszt's music, and perhaps more significantly, by emulating Liszt's activities as a transcriber and composer, Busoni enhanced piano sonority while extending Liszt's ideas about the future of music. In that way, he shared attitudes associated with the Zukunftsmusik movement, and his outlook was rooted in Liszt's compositions, as opposed to Richard Wagner's. At the same time, he helped foster a lineage of young musicians who patterned their careers and music after Liszt.Drawing on surviving memoirs, letters, scores, essays and concert programmes, this article thus explores Liszt's impact on Busoni and his mentees. It reveals a musician not only emulating Liszt, but also expanding upon his ideas and promoting them to others.

Szkarłatna partytura Ralfa Isaua jako przykład recepcji twórczości Franza Liszta w literackiej kulturze popularnej

Artykuł stanowi studium powieści Ralfa Isaua Die Dunklen (2007; wyd. pol. Szkarłatna partytura, 2011). Analizie poddane zostało znaczenie obecności twórczości i postaci muzyka Franza Liszta w powieści. Isau zawarł w niej wykład z historii muzyki i estetyki muzycznej, a także biografię Franza Liszta oraz rozważania dotyczące wpływu muzyki na zachowanie człowieka (Platon, barokowa teoria afektów, retoryka muzyczna, muzyka programowa, audiomarketing). Zasadniczą część pracy stanowią rozważania dotyczące powiązań między powieściową narracją i kształtowaniem struktury powieści a elementami i technikami muzycznymi.

Liszt, Meyerbeer, Cosima Wagner und ihre Kontakte in den Südwesten: Musikalische Adelskultur in der Region

Based on the understanding of 19th-century musical culture as predominantly bourgeois, this chapter presents relationships between its courtly and interregional aspects. Using examples from Wertheim, Buckeburg, Sigmaringen, Urach, Schillingsfurst and Langenburg, it documents interactions with Franz Liszt, Cosima Wagner, Giacomo Meyerbeer, J. G. Rheinberger and Ignaz Brull. In addition, the letters of the Donaueschingen choirmaster Thomas Taglichsbeck illustrate his interregional network including contacts with Ferdinand Hiller, Louis Spohr and Gioacomo Meyerbeer.

Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda by Kelly St. Pierre

Reviewed by: Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda by Kelly St. Pierre Sebastian Bolz Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda. By Kelly St. Pierre. (Eastman Studies in Music, no. 139.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2017. [ 166 p. ISBN 9781580465106, $90; ISBN 9781782049364 (e-book), $90.] Music examples, bibliography, index. Filling a peculiar research gap, Kelly St. Pierre's study is a welcome and concise contribution to the field. Despite the popularity of Bedřich Smetana's music, no author of a substantial book-length piece has taken the task to reevaluate his life and work in a while. St. Pierre mentions John Clapham's monograph (Smetana [London: Dent, 1972]) as a last milestone written in English, and while German scholarship has otherwise been quite productive concerning Czech music in the last two decades, Smetana continues to be a desideratum for further research. Partaking in the discourse on the construction of national and cultural identity in terms of music, St. Pierre does not need to establish genuine methodological or theoretical accounts; instead she draws on concepts such as Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities" (p. 112; Benedict Richard O'Gorman Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism [London: Verso, 1991]), thus contributing to the discussion of ideological overtones that has become prominent for Czech music (e.g., Miloš Zapletal, "From Tragedy to Romance, from Positivism to Myth: Nejedlý's Conception of the History of Modern Czech Music," in Nationality vs Universality: Music Historiographies in Central and Eastern Europe, ed. Sławomira [End Page 489] Żerańska-Kominek [New castle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2016], 99–124). In the face of the undeniable language barrier for every scholar interested in Czech music culture, it is of high worth that St. Pierre brings together a wide range of published sources, such as articles and edited correspondences in translation (mostly her own). Future research will have to deal with archival material in order to extend or specify our understanding of Smetana's position in the construction of Czech national music, whereby labels like "Czech" or "German" generally appear as markers of self- or nonidentification and "as a mode of reception, not as analyzable fact" (p. 111). St. Pierre's study is chronologically structured in two parts. While the first three chapters deal with Smetana's role in the early phase of the Czech national movement up to the late nineteenth century, the last two examine twentieth-century scholarship and its protagonists up to the present. St. Pierre starts with what is generally called the "national rebirth" (p. 8) and the clubs (most importantly the "Umělecká beseda") that backed and furthered it, drawing the picture of a heterogeneous, conflict-ridden milieu that sought to establish a community before "building" a genuine "Czech tradition" (p. 19). Within the overlapping circles of politics and arts that became somewhat indistinguishable, the study's overall argument follows a double perspective on Smetana. Over the course of the first three chapters, it becomes clear that arts, such as composing and writing, actively aimed at creating a cultural identity, while the artists and their products were declared as "national symbols" (p. 2), thus being objects of a sociocultural attribution. Chapters 2 and 3 situate Smetana in a European context and trace the intricacies of the composer's relations with Franz Liszt and Richard Wagner in their functions as musical authorities (who can be called on in terms of establishing new canonic formations) and figures of national monumentalization at the same time. Through "inflections of, engagement with, and contrasts to German genres and ideas" (p. 26), the rhetoric of the Wagner-reception was particularly wedged in what St. Pierre characterizes as a "mixed message" (p. 57). Critics celebrated Smetana's Wagnerian aspirations (in his opera Dalibor) as an emblem of Czech cultural relevance but denied Czech music's dependence on Wagner as the prototypical German composer. One aspect that makes these chapters particularly intriguing is their perspective on music history (and its making) as media history, recognizable not only by the range and character of journals like Dalibor and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, but also by the language of "poetic paraphrase...

Chopin and George Sand: An International Affair

Chopin and George Sand: An International Affair James Gibbons Huneker (bio) Chopin was never a hearty partisan of the Romantic movement. Its extravagance, misplaced enthusiasm, turbulence, attacks on church, state and tradition disturbed the finical Pole while noise, réclame and boisterousness chilled and repulsed him . . . he objected to smashing idols and refused to wade in gutters to reach his ideal. He was not a fighter, yet as one reviews the past half century it is his still small voice that has emerged from the din, the golden voice of a poet and not the roar of the artistic demagogues of his day. . . . Nor do I propose to discuss the details of the affair which has been dwelt upon ad nauseam by every twanger of the romantic string. The idealists will always see a union of souls, the realists—and there were plenty of them in Paris taking notes from 1837 to 1847—view the alliance as a matter for gossip. The truth lies midway. Chopin, a neurotic being, met the polyandrous Sand, a trampler on all the social and ethical conventions, albeit a woman of great gifts; repelled at first he gave way before the ardent passion she manifested towards him. She was his elder, so could veil the situation with the maternal mask, and she was the stronger intellect, more celebrated—Chopin was but a pianist in the eyes of the many—and so won by her magnetism the man she desired. . . . Paris, artistic Paris, was full of such situations. . . . [Chopin] may be fairly called a moralist. Carefully reared in the Roman Catholic religion, he died confessing that faith. With the exception of the Sand episode, his life was not an irregular one. He abhorred the vulgar and tried to conceal this infatuation from his parents. . . . Chopin met Sand at a musical matinée in 1837. . . . Sand was antipathetic to Chopin but her technique for overcoming masculine coyness was as remarkable in its particular fashion as Chopin’s proficiency at the keyboard. They were soon seen together, and everywhere. She was not musical, not a trained musician, but her appreciation for all art forms was highly sympathetic. Not a beautiful woman, being swarthy and rather heavy-set in figure, this is what she was, as seen by Édouard Grenier:— She was short and stout, but her face attracted all my attention, the eyes especially. They were wonderful eyes, a little too close together, it may be, large, with full eyelids, and black, very black, but by no means lustrous; they reminded me of unpolished marble, or rather of velvet, and this gave a [End Page 197] strange, dull, even cold expression to her countenance. Her fine eyebrows and these great placid eyes gave her an air of strength and dignity which was not borne out by the lower part of her face. Her nose was rather thick and not over shapely. Her mouth was also rather coarse and her chin small. She spoke with great simplicity, and her manners were very quiet. But she attracted with imperious power all that she met. Liszt felt this attraction at one time—and it is whispered that Chopin was jealous of him. Pouf! the woman who could conquer Franz Liszt in his youth must have been a sorceress. . . . In 1838, Sand’s boy Maurice being ill, she proposed a visit to Majorca. Chopin went with the party in November and full accounts of the Mediterranean trip, Chopin’s illness, the bad weather, discomforts and all the rest may be found in the “Histoire de Ma Vie” by Sand. It was a time of torment. “Chopin is a detestable invalid,” said Sand, and so they returned to Nohant1 in June 1839. They saw Genoa for a few days in May, but that is as far as Chopin ever penetrated into the promised land—Italy, at one time a passion with him. Sand enjoyed the subtle and truly feminine pleasure of again entering the city which six years before she had visited in company with another man, the former lover of Rachel.2 Chopin’s health in 1839 was a source of alarm to himself and his friends. He had...

The Strange Career of Ulysses S. Grant

The Strange Career of Ulysses S. Grant Owen Wister (bio) OWEN WISTER (1860–1938) is now best known as the author of The Virginian, a novel published in 1902 and one of the founding documents in the enduring and endlessly evolving conception of the American frontier in general and the western hero in particular. The grandson of Fanny Kemble, one of the most celebrated actresses of the nineteenth century, he was born in Philadelphia, educated in boarding schools in Europe and the United States, and graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1882. His early ambitions centered on music (Franz Liszt heard him play and confirmed his achievements), but he returned to Philadelphia to undertake a career in business at the same time as he pursued a series of writing projects. The strain produced by these conflicting imperatives likely resulted in a nervous breakdown, and in 1885 he traveled to Wyoming—the first of many such trips to that region—in hopes of restoring his health. After securing a degree from the Harvard Law School, he committed himself to a life as a writer of western fiction, publishing a sequence of stories and novels on this theme over the decade from 1891 to 1902. Two years before the appearance of The Virginian, an enormously successful book that would continue to hold the attention of readers for generations, Wister published a brief biography of Ulysses S. Grant in the series of Beacon Biographies of Eminent Americans edited by Mark De Wolfe Howe. In later years there were some comparable works: The Seven Ages of Washington came out in 1907 and Roosevelt: The Story of a Friendship, which traced his association with Theodore Roosevelt back to their years together at Harvard, appeared in 1930. Over the course of the last three decades of his life, Wister's work moved in different directions—he brought out a novel of social manners, Lady Baltimore (1906), reminiscent of Henry James, who was a friend of his mother's, as well as a variety of political writings; but he was drawn again and again to the western, which— however uneasy he might have been about the literary confinement associated with that genre—seemed to offer him a necessary imaginative home. As for General and later President Ulysses S. Grant, his complex career, alternating between personal failure and public success, has continued to haunt the minds of readers and writers ever since the publication of his Memoirs, one of the greatest works of American autobiography ever written. F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night is only one of the works that reflects its deep and lasting impact and the vexing nature of Grant's ambiguous example. This excerpt from Owen Wister's short life of Grant is taken from his Ulysses S. Grant in the Beacon series, published in 1900 by Small, Maynard & Company in Boston. —SD [End Page 197] None of our public men have a story so strange as this. It is stranger than Lincoln's. It is very much the strangest of them all. ________ Is it accident that at the beginning of a certain four years this middle-aged man should be nobody, and at the end should be the one commander out of all to win and retain the supreme confidence of his government and his people? It has been called accident by some grown-up writers. His own words give the unconscious explanation: "I feel as sure of taking Richmond as I do of dying." Not McClellan, not Meade, not Lincoln himself, not any one at all, had ever been able to feel as sure as that. This utter certainty of the Union's success burned in Grant like a central fire, and, with all his limitations, made his will a great natural force which gravitated simply and irresistibly to its end. Lincoln, beginning to feel it from afar, answered the grave complaints that rose after the carnage of Shiloh: "I can't spare this man: he fights." And presently, during the impatient days of Vicksburg failures, he insists: "I rather like the man. I think we'll try him a little longer." Finally comes the renowned remark...

Dohnányi und die Tradition Das Klavierquintett Nr. 2 es-Moll, op. 26 (1914)

Abstract Dohnányi's Second Piano Quintet in E-flat minor was written in 1914 and is less well-known than his first one dating from 1895. The composer has been called a traditionalist, so it is worth examining how tradition appears in this work. The outer movements of the three-movement-form are both elegiac and weighty. The beginning bears the key signature of E-flat major instead of minor, but the keys are changing rapidly as the piece progresses. This is reminiscent of Franz Schubert or of Antonín Dvořák, for instance in his Piano Quartet (op. 87) inspired by Brahms. The third movement's opening is a homage to Beethoven's late String Quartet in A Minor (op. 132). While the latter works on a sub-thematic level, Dohnányi presents an elaborated theme in fugal technique, which in 1914 was a more conservative approach than Beethoven's in 1825. For Dohnányi, the symmetric structures are not a way out of traditional tonality (unlike for Bartók, who also frequently used symmetries), but rather are a way of extending it. The formal concept is no less interesting. The recapitulation of the first movement's material within the third is evocative of the double-function form used by Franz Liszt. While Liszt conflated the traditional multi-movement form into a new one-movement form, Dohnányi – so to speak – concealed the characteristics of the new one-movement form inside a traditional three-movement form. Thus, one could ask if the accusations against Dohnányi for being a traditionalist are justified. Perhaps instead we should reconsider how traditionalism and modernity are situated in our own set of aesthetic values.

Rewriting Mazeppa: Meaning and communication in Liszt’s virtuoso and program music

Musical virtuosity is often studied with an emphasis on the outstanding skills of the performer and their sensory and emotional effects on the listener. However, Franz Liszt, one of the main virtuosos in music history, was convinced that what matters in virtuosity is its specific function within the semantic and communicative processing of music. This article proposes a theoretical framework to further investigate Liszt’s intuitions in light of contemporary research on musical meaning and communication. First, we analyze philological data concerning Liszt’s creative process in the Mazeppa works, a set of works including both his virtuoso and program music. Second, we compare our results with recent research on music semantics based on inferential processes about the composer/performer’s intentions (Antović, Stamenković, & Figar, 2016; Schlenker, 2017). We criticize the associationist hypothesis (the idea that the composer’s intention is that the listener infers an association between the music and a real or fictional state of the world) and we defend a causalist hypothesis (the idea that the composer’s intention is that the listener recognizes the music as being an intentional “rewriting” of the states of the world, mental or physical, that are the causes of the music itself). Third, we suggest that what distinguishes Liszt’s virtuoso and program music rewritings are the visual and gestural components of two listening experiences: the virtuoso music “rewrites” its episodic causes (memories, personal experiences) whereas the program music “rewrites” its genetic causes (the work’s creative path and intertextual relations).

PARAPHRASE IN THE GENRE SYSTEM OF PIANO TRANSCRIPTIONS OF FRANZ LISZT

Purpose of the research is to reveal the location of Paraphrase in the genre system of Franz Liszt's pianistic transcription heritage. Methodology. The research methodology is based on the principle of historicism, system approach, genre analysis, methods of intonation-dramaturgy, and structural-functional analysis. Scientific novelty. The place of Paraphrase in the system of genres of the transcriptional sphere of F. Liszt was revealed; artistic methods and principles, operating in time-space Liszt’s Rigoletto. Paraphrase de Concert were established; the content of the Paraphrase concept in the legacy of F. Liszt is clarified. Conclusions. A review of the scientific literature has made it possible to determine the place of the Paraphrase genre in the hierarchical system of piano transcriptions as a species, along with Reminiscences which goes back to the genus Fantaisie and the type of Transcription. Paraphrases in the works of F. List appear at a later stage than the Reminiscences (Ernani., Paraphrase de Concert - 1849, revised in 1859, Rigoletto, Paraphrase de Concert - 1859). It is revealed that in the work of F. Liszt Paraphrase does not play the role of genre generalization in the system of writings of the transcriptor sphere, and Reminiscences, having reached the heyday phase, has a significant impact on the interpretation of Paraphrase, the essence of which is the transformation from salon into a concert genre. At the same time, fragments from operas remain the object of the Paraphrase replay, and the method of recomposition is retelling of fragments of operatic memories. Rigoletto is analyzed. Paraphrase de Concert of F. Liszt allowed to reveal artistic methods and principles that operate in time-space compositions. The use of the reminiscence method is manifested in the conceptualization of the genre and philosophical interpretation of the operatic prototype. The interaction of the reminiscence method with fantasy is evidenced by the free sequence of episodes of the fragment of the quartet from the third act of the opera by G. Verdi. The process of synthesis is the interaction of genres of transcription, fantasy, reminiscences, opera, features Capriccio, which unites the style of Paraphrase. The method of symphonism is expressed in a through development, and the method of Shakespearization is in gravitation towards drama, in an effort to philosophical generalization. Among the principles applied by F. Liszt there are the laws of transcendental virtuosity and concerts. The innovative interpretation of Paraphrase in the works of F. Liszt marks the beginning of a new stage in the history of the genre.

Лист и Гензельт. (часть I) «Высокочтимый коллега и любимый друг»: история отношений Ференца Листа и Адольфа фон Гензельта, воссозданная по их переписке

Статья посвящена истории взаимоотношений Ференца Листа и петербургского пианиста, композитора и педагога Адольфа фон Гензельта (1814–1889). В исполнительстве, композиторском творчестве, жизни Лист и Гензельт были полными противоположностями: первый был знаменитым европейским виртуозом, второй – забытым почти сразу же после смерти петербургским музыкантом; первый воплощал романтический артистизм, второй отказался от исполнительской карьеры, замкнувшись в учительском ремесле, первый являлся типичным экстравертом, второй – интровертом. Тем не менее, их дружба и творческий диалог продолжались почти 40 лет. Статья основана на неизвестных архивных материалах, находящихся в архивах и библиотеках Санкт-Петербурга, Москвы, Веймара и Швабаха. Актуальность исследования и его новизна характеризуются тем, что в данной статье впервые вводятся в научный обиход неизвестные архивные материалы, а также дается новая интерпретация уже опубликованных писем Листа и Гензельта. Цель исследования – дать сравнительный портрет двух выдающихся европейских романтиков, определивших развитие пианизма ХIX века, изучив их эпистолярию, а также нотные манускрипты, содержащие эскизы II части Концерта Гензельта f-moll ор. 16 и его Этюда D-dur ор. 2 № 9. The article is devoted to the history of the relationship between Franz Liszt and the Petersburg pianist, composer and teacher Adolf von Henselt (1814–1889). In performance, composer creativity, life, Liszt and Henselt were complete opposites: the first was a famous European virtuoso, the second was forgotten almost immediately after his death St. Petersburg musician; the first person embodied romantic artistry, the second one abandoned his performing career, closed himself in the teacher's craft; the fi rst was a typical extrovert, the second was an introvert. Nevertheless, their friendship and creative dialogue lasted almost 40 years. The article is based on unknown archival materials, located in the archives and libraries of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Weimar and Schwabach. The relevance of the research and its novelty are characterized by the fact that in this article unknown archival materials are introduced for scientifi c use for the fi rst time, and a new interpretation of the already published Liszt and Henselt letters is given. The aim of the research is to give a comparative portrait of two outstanding European Romantics who determined the development of the 19th century pianism, having studied their epistolary, and also musical manuscripts containing sketches of the second part of Henselt's Concerto in F minor op. 16 and his Etude in D Major op. 2 No. 9.

Franz Liszt – a world citizen or a Hungarian patriot? Hungarian Rhapsodies as an example of implementing the concept of national music

The article is an attempt to determine the attitude of Franz Liszt to Hungary – the country where the composer was born, which in the 19th century was part of the Austrian Empire. The artist was shaped in accordance with the Western European culture model. That in combination with contacts with the intellectuals and the world of art deeply transformed Liszt’s worldview and shaped his artistic profile. This cosmopolitan attitude changed at a certain stage of his life when he returned to his home country. In Hungary, a process began, which allowed Liszt to notice the meaning of his country’s culture. This tendency was expressed in the composer’s interest in Gypsy music and national folklore. The article characterises the music of Hungarian Roma people as well as folk dances (verbunkos, czardas). The influence of the aforementioned elements is noticeable in Liszt’s compositions from that period, especially in the nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies. The cycle includes clear references to Gypsy music, the sound of a Roma band in particular. A reference to folklore is the form of the pieces and the stylistic means taken from verbunkos, among others. The Rhapsodies are a masterly combination of virtuoso technique with the capacities of the piano (imitation of the cimbalom or glockenspiel). The composer incorporated new harmonic qualities, such as a Gypsy scale or imitation of folk bass. At the same time, the cycle remains in accordance with the rules of classical harmony. Liszt’s searching for new composition possibilities and sound qualities gave an impulse for the development of ethnomusicology, exploring and formulating new concepts in the art of piano playing (e.g. by Béla Bartók).

Lwówek Śląski in the arms of the muses. The activity of prince Constantin Hohenzollern’s private orchestra in the period of 1852–1869.

Prince Constantine (Friedrich Wilhelm Constantine) of Hohenzollern-Hechingen, a great music lover, aimed to create a good orchestra at his court. In the 1840s, he had already had a decent ensemble conducted by Thomas Täglichsbeck, which gave regular concerts in Hechingen. Villa Eugenia, the prince’s palace at that time, hosted numerous prominent figures from the world of music, first of all Franz Liszt; this acquaintance had a great influence on Constantine. After he abdicated and moved to his dominions in Silesia, in 1852 the prince decided to build a little palace with a concert hall for three hundred people in Lwówek Śląski (then German Löwenberg in Schlesien). Free weekly performances of the orchestra in the winter season (from November to April) in a provincial town of five thousand dwellers were something unheard of, so they soon attracted attention of music lovers. The artistic life of Lwówek was frequently described in the press in Wrocław, Leipzig and Berlin, it was also mentioned in foreign magazines. People praised the excellence of the orchestra, which achieved the peak of its capacities under the new chapelmaster Max Seifriz. He worked systematically on new repertoire and was particularly eager to perform compositions by young composers of the so-called New German School. The ensemble’s fame was consolidated by concerts whose guest conductors were the stars of the world of music of that time, i.e., Franz Liszt, Hector Berlioz and Richard Wagner. The activity of the orchestra and the time of musical glory of Lwówek came to a sudden end when prince Constantine died in 1869.

Raphael, the Virgin Mary, and Holy Matrimony: Recontextualizing Franz Liszt's Sposalizio

Sposalizio, the piece opening the “Italian year” of Franz Liszt's Années de pèlerinage (first published in 1858), is one of the most analyzed and interpreted compositions in this piano cycle. Much attention has been paid to its connection with the painting of the same title by Raphael, which was printed as an internal title page for the piece's first edition at the explicit request of the composer. This connection has inspired many studies on the relationship between image and music, reinforcing the notion of Sposalizio as a musical realization of Raphael's painting as seen by Liszt for the first time in February 1838 at the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan. Adopting a critical view of the hermeneutical tradition, which has an impact on the interpretation of the piece still today, and assuming that its composition began in Weimar only around 1848, the article proposes an alternative reading of the piece. By connecting pictorial and musical elements, Sposalizio seems to evoke several cultural discourses and practices fundamental to Liszt's artistic and biographical background, such as Raphael's image as a genius, the revival of Marian devotion, and marriage as a sacrament of the Catholic Church.

Kultūros, dialogo ir keliautojo apmąstymai tarptautinėse studentų dirbtuvėse Florencijoje

Kultūros, dialogo ir keliautojo apmąstymai tarptautinėse studentų dirbtuvėse Florencijoje

A Vindication of Ferdinand Hiller

ABSTRACTThe personal attacks made against Ferdinand Hiller, director of the Cologne conservatory from 1850 to 1884, by members of the circle surrounding Franz Liszt need to be reexamined in the light of anti-Semitism in nineteenth-century music. Hiller’s review of the Aachen music festival (1857) includes a report on Liszt’s conducting that is partly—but not exclusively—critical, corresponding to other reviews about the pianist’s conducting on this and other occasions. Because of this criticism, Hiller’s review was the subject of false accusations that became the pretext for defamatory attacks, made particularly by Liszt followers Hans von Bülow and Hans von Bronsart. Hiller eventually won a libel lawsuit against Otto Lessmann, who had to print a retraction in the Allgemeine deutsche Musik-Zeitung (Berlin). Nevertheless, Lina Ramann’s 1894 biography of Liszt repeats an embellished version of the libelous charge, which has—unfortunately—become the basis of our modern perception of Hiller’s character.

An orangutan in Paris: pondering Proximity at the Muséum d'histoire naturelle in 1836.

When the Muséum d'histoire naturelle in Paris learned in 1836 that it had the chance to buy a live, young orangutan, it was excited by the prospect. Specimens were the focus of the Museum's activities, and this particular specimen seemed especially promising, not only because the Museum had very few orangutan specimens in its collection, but also because of what was perceived to be the orangutan's unique place in the natural order of things, namely, at the very boundary between the animal kingdom and humans. Frédéric Cuvier, the superintendent of the Museum's menagerie, urged that studying the orangutan's mental faculties would help resolve fundamental questions regarding the similarities and differences between animals and humans. Archival and printed sources allow one to reconstruct the orangutan's capture, acquisition, and subsequent career at the menagerie in greater detail than has generally been possible for animals of nineteenth-century zoos. Scientists, artists, the public, the press, and even musicians (Franz Liszt included) sought to engage with the orangutan, seeing in it not just another ape or monkey but a special creature unto itself at the animal/human boundary. Key to their fascination with the orangutan was the question of proximity-just how close was the orangutan to humans? The orangutan's story illuminates not only how the animal-human boundary was conceived at the time but also the problematic status of the zoo as a site for scientific research and the roles of scientific and non-scientific actors alike in constructing how the orangutan was understood.