September 21, 2015 • 33 mins
Franz Liszt was a pianist, a composer and a conductor, and basically the first rock star who drove fans into fits of swooning and screaming. Some fans even stole the detritus of his life (unfinished coffee, broken piano strings) to carry with them. Read the show notes here.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast That's Crazy. B Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying. I have a confession to make of
a long holding jealousy. It's been with me quite a while.
(00:23):
I have always been jealous of Sarah and Bablina having
already covered the right of Spring riots on our podcast.
The whole story is just so weird they already covered
it back in so I've had my eye out for
some other kind of weird musical story to cover as
like a sad consolation prize. This is not a sad
(00:44):
consolation prize. This is actually awesome. It is about a
musical mass hysteria that is from the mid nineteenth century,
and that is list Omania. Yeah. Uh, it's delightful. I mean,
there's no way around it. I feel kind of sorry
for the guy, but at the same time it's pretty great.
So before we start, as as often happens, I need
(01:07):
a little note. So today, the word mania definitely has
psychological connotations, right. It's used to describe this excessively elevated
mood or really hyperactive mental state, and that can also
extend into like physical hyperactivity and other behaviors. And usually
it's used this way in the context of like bipolar disorder,
other mental and emotional disorders. And there are definitely folks
(01:29):
who would really prefer that the word mania not be
used to describe more generally just being really excited or busy.
But at the time when the word list domania was coined,
the word mania was really a physical description, it was
not a psychological one, and so list romania was considered
to be a frantic and dangerous physiological response to being
(01:51):
around France list And so when we use the word
mania in today's show, that is the context that we
are talking about. I can think of was all those
shots of the women in the crowd as the Beatles
landed in America. It's very similar. Well, and to be honest,
I saw the Boston Symphony, the Boston Pops specifically do
(02:14):
a whole night of the Beatles, and um, it was amazing.
I was. I was really there to see John Hodgman
do what's it called the Introduction to Orchestra for young people.
Oh yeah, that Yeah, it was hilarious and there was
a there was a narration through the whole thing that
talked about among other things, Beatlemania, and I had this
movement where I was like, what if we did a
(02:35):
podcast on beatle Maia, and I couldn't figure out a
way to make that feel legitimate. So this feels a
lot more legitimate and also very fun. So to give
you a little bit of background and set this up,
Franz List was born in Devoreon, Hungary, which is now Raiding, Austria,
(02:56):
although it is still referred to as Devoreon if you
speak Hungarian, on October eighteen eleven, and the Boreon at
the time was rather small. It was basically a market
town and most of the people who lived there were
both German speaking and ethnically Hungarian or MegaR. Liszt was
the only child of Adam Liszt and Anna Maria Lager.
(03:18):
Adam List worked as a clerk for Prince Nicholas esther Hazy,
who was a musical patron and a lists father was
also an amateur musician who could play several different instruments,
including the cello and the piano. Franz lists father had
also spent two years in the Franciscan Order, so Franz
grew into a religiously pretty devoted child. Liz already showed
(03:42):
a really distinct love of music by the age of six,
and his father started to give him music lessons. Franz
was just enormously talented, and he really progressed in his
musical study extremely quickly. By the time he was nine,
he was giving public performances as a concert pianist, and
after his first performance, local big wigs actually donated money
to fund the next several years of his musical education. Soon,
(04:06):
his prodigious ability outstripped the resources that were available in
De Boreon, so liszts father asked for an extended leave
of absence from his employer and took Franz to Vienna.
There he studied piano with Carl Cherney, who himself had
studied with Ludwig von Beethoven. Liszt also studied composition with
(04:27):
Antonio Salieri, who was much more famous for his relationship
with and rivalry with Mozart. Both of these two teachers
were so impressed with liszts talent that they refused to
be paid for their work with him. Franz's first public
performance in Vienna was in eighteen twenty two, so he
would have been about eleven years old at this time,
(04:48):
and he was described as quote a little hercules fallen
from the clouds. He started writing his own compositions that
same year. The next year, Franz met Lidwig on Beethoven
for the first time, and according to one possibly apocryphal account,
Beethoven was so charmed that he kissed him on the forehead.
(05:10):
Three was also the year that Lizt moved to Paris.
This move was another one that was made so that
he could continue his studies with other musical masters. And
while the Paris Conservatory declined to admit him on the
grounds that he was not French, check composer Anton Russia
and Italian composer Fernando Paier taught him privately. In addition
(05:30):
to his studies, he put on extensive public performances and
he really started to develop quite a following. However, in
eighteen six, when he was fifteen years old, Franz's father
died suddenly of typhoid. His father had really been his
primary source of support during all of this musical training
and performing, Plus the boy was only fifteen years old.
(05:52):
He had not always had good health up until this point,
and this whole theories of touring and studying had been
really fatiguing. After his father's death, Franz had to share
a one bedroom apartment with his mother, and, grieving and exhausted,
he turned to teaching piano to try to make a living.
He actually fell in love with one of his students.
(06:14):
She's going to set a trend for his later life.
When her father forced him to end their relationship, he
became so ill that newspapers printed obituaries for him. Afterward,
he retreated from public performance for almost four years, and
he spent most of this time reading and teaching music.
(06:35):
He started to compose music again in eighteen thirty following
the July Revolution in which King Charles the tenth was
overthrown and succeeded by Louis Philippe. In his mother's words
quote the cannons cured him, and afterward he met several
more famous names in the musical world, including Hector Berlioz,
Niccolo Paganini, and Frederic Chopin. Liszt met the married Comtesse
(06:58):
Marie Dagou in eighteen thirty three, when he was twenty
two years old. In spite of her being married, he
fell in love with her and they were to be
together for twelve years. They eventually had three children together.
To avoid the scorn of Parisian society over this affair
with a married woman, they left and spent the next
four years traveling through Europe, including Switzerland, Italy, and other
(07:22):
non Paris parts of France. His travels and his love
for her started to inspire him to compose, and he
wrote a set of sweets for solo piano, which became
the highly praised A ned de pillery Nage. Over the
next few years, lists reputation as a musician grew just dramatically.
He gave tours and performances and really made a name
(07:45):
for himself as a virtuoso composer and pianist, and as
well as an extremely charismatic and very expressive performer. He
also became known for being quite generous with his music
and his time. He often taught people and also exce
did official posts for free, so we thought, all this
without pay, and then he would donate the proceeds from
(08:06):
his concerts to charity. He also developed a different reputation
thanks to his behavior off stage. James Honker's nineteen eleven biography,
in chapter two, which is called Aspects of his art
and character begins lists and the ladies. It's like this
is like the heading, so it's like one list and
(08:27):
the lady. The feminine friendships of Franz List gained for
him as much notoriety as his music making. To the
average public, he was a compound of Casanova, Byron and Gheta,
and to this mixture could have been added the name
of Stendhow lists, love affairs, lists, children lists, perilous escape
(08:48):
from daggers, pistols and poisons were the subjects of conversation
in Europe three quarters of a century ago. As earlier,
Byron was both hero and black sheep in the current
gossip of his time. Let's just add to the subjects
of conversation right now that he was also extremely attractive,
Like I'm having trouble picking out which extremely attractive picture
(09:11):
of Fronz List should accompany our blog post, in our
show notes and and the episode itself, because there are many.
And he looks like he looks like the boy at
your high school who was very sensitive and soulful and
wrote terrible poetry and made all of the girls think
that he was just so tragically attractive Like that, that's
(09:33):
what he looked like, yeah, he looks like every guy
in every Um movie about teenage forlornness as well that like,
he's so beautiful, no one will ever understand him. Yep,
I'm not. He is a pretty thing. I mean, he's
very beautiful. So basically this all meant that Bronze List
(09:56):
was a nineteenth century virtuo so piano rock star him.
That's where this mania comes in. We're going to talk
about after a brief word from a sponsor, So two
understand this mania that erupted around Franz List. Let's start
by talking about what he was like in concert. Here
(10:16):
is a description written by Hans Christian Anderson of all people.
As List sat before the piano, the first impression of
his personality was derived from the appearance of strong passions
in his land face, so that he seems to me
a demon nailed fast to the instrument. Once his tones
streamed forth, they came from his blood, from his thoughts.
(10:38):
He was a demon who would liberate his soul from
the thralldom. He was on the rack, his blood flowed
and his nerves trembled. But as he continued to play,
so the demon vanished. I saw that pale face assume
a nobler and brighter expression. The divine soul shone from
his eyes from every feature, he became as beauteous as
(11:01):
only spirit and enthusiasm can make their worshippers really, Liz
had been breaking new ground in his concert performances. It
was not at this point common for just a man
and a piano to have a whole stage to himself,
but Liz did basically invent this sort of recital as
a performance format, and it definitely wasn't common for someone
(11:23):
to play the piano like a demon turned divine. The
whole performance was so enormously expressive and a motive, and
the audience tended to really just get caught up in it.
On top of that, this played with the piano in
profile so that people could see his face while he played,
and he would whip his kind of longish hair around
(11:44):
as he was playing, which was very striking. He also
played all of his music from memory, which a lot
of other musicians of the day thought was extremely rude,
especially when you were playing work that someone else had written,
which could make people think that you had actually written
it herself. On December one, Franz List played the first
(12:06):
concert in what would be a ten week tour of Germany,
and the audience was overcome. Women shrieked and swooned, and
there was a general atmosphere of rapturous chaos and from
the men jealousy. It got weirder from there. People started
wearing lockets and brooches that had its face on them,
(12:26):
which is not that weird. I mean, it's not that
much different from having a T shirt with your favorite
boy band face on it. Women, however, started carrying vials
with them in case Franz List walked away from some
night not quite empty cup of coffee, so they could
like spirit away the unconsumed dregs of his coffee and
(12:47):
then carry it around with them. In that vile people
scavenged his old coffee grounds and cigar butts. Also, there's
even one story of a lady in waiting having one
of his discarded cig our butts encased in a locket
that had his initials and jewels on the front. I
love it. I mean that one makes perfect sense to me.
(13:09):
Remember that Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton were walking
around with bials of one another's blood. Yes, it was
like that. I get it. Uh. Women would literally attack
List when this mania was going on, so they would
tear off parts of his clothes, they would try to
snip pieces of his hair, and they would fight one
another for their spoils. He'd throw gloves and handkerchiefs into
(13:33):
the audience after performances, and the scene would devolve into fisticuffs,
sometimes with the articles that people were fighting over being
torn to bits in the process. His manner of playing
the piano was also very prone to breaking strings, and
women would scavenge those broken springs also and then make
them into bracelets, which is one of the less weird
(13:54):
parts of all of it. I love that. I love
a little crafty fandom. And yes, in case you're wondering,
there are reports of women throwing their garments onto the stage,
including their undergarments, although this is disputed as to whether
or not its fact or fancy. So although most of
the list domania behavior has attributed to women, men definitely
(14:17):
did get on the action to some of them in
their own excitement and some of them in the form
of fighting one another in fits of jealousy. It was
poet and journalist Heinrich Heina who coined the word Liz
Domeny on April four, at which point Liz had actually
moved on to Paris. And at first Hina actually thought
(14:38):
this whole phenomenon was a result of social and legal expectations.
In Germany. It was culturally more reserved than Paris, with
a more stringent law enforcement. So his supposition was that
people were taking this opportunity to legally blow off steam
where they could. But then Franzlist came to Paris, where
people were a lot freer, there was a lot more
(15:00):
social wiggle room. The exact same thing happened, uh, And
he wrote quite a lot about it. We're not going
to read all of it, but we are going to
read kind of a lengthy bit of Heina's description, which
goes strange. Thought. I these Parisians who have seen Napoleon,
who had to win one battle after another to hold
(15:21):
their attention, Now they are claiming our franz List. And
what in a claim? It was a veritable insanity, one
unheard of in the annals of fur Or what is
the reason of this phenomenon? The solution of this question
belongs to the domain of pathology rather than that of esthetics.
A physician whose specialty is female diseases, and whom I
(15:44):
asked to explain the magic our List exerted upon his public,
smiled in the strangest manner, and at the same time
said all sorts of things about magnetism, galvinism, electricity, of
the contagion of a close haul filled with countless wax
lights and several hundred perfumed and perspiring human beings, of
(16:05):
historical epilepsy, of the phenomenon of tickling, of musical canthrides,
and other scabbarous things which I believe have reference to
the mysteries of the bonadilla. Perhaps the solution of the
question is not buried in such adventurous depths, but floats
on a very prosaic surface. It seems to me at
(16:27):
times that all this sorcery may be explained by the
fact that no one on earth knows, uh knows so
well how to organize his successes or raise their mais
en as our Frand's list in this art. He is
a genius. As we said at the top of the show,
the medical establishment thought this was a contagious, dangerous physical
(16:51):
syndrome that could actually be passed from one overwrought lady
to another. They feared an epidemic. So basically, people have
been pathologizing young women being really excited about music for
almost a hundred and seventy five years. That wasn't new
with the Beatles, No, not new with any boy bands
since then, all the way back to franz List, maybe
(17:14):
even before. It's possible that there were similar stories and
other cultures. All of the resources I had in my
disposal were about like the Western musical tradition. Who knows,
so actually this whole thing kind of plagued franz List.
Other musicians were absolutely appalled at the audience's behavior, including
really famous names like Chopin and Schumann and Mendelssohn. A
(17:37):
lot of people in the musical world really started to
dislike franz List based on what they saw is this vulgar,
needless hero worship that was undecorous and dangerous, And lists
own correspondence sounds vaguely baffled at this pattern. I mean,
he was obviously doing some things to encourage it, like
on purpose throwing gloves and handkerchiefs into the audience, but
(18:00):
he really still didn't seem to quite fathom the extent
of everybody's intensity. But just like Beatlemania, spice Girlmania and
beaver Fever, it eventually subsided. We're going to talk about
that some more after we have a quick word from
one of our fabulous sponsors. So to get to the
end of liszt Domania and the end of frons less life.
(18:24):
In eighty seven, List met Princess Caroline's son Wittgenstein, and
he met her in Kiev and they started a relationship,
and she, like his previous long term love affair, was married.
The princess wanted him to stop touring and settle down
and focus on teaching and composing instead, and so while
he and the previous his previous love interest to contest
(18:48):
had needed to escape Paris and scandal, instead, List was
installed in the Princess's estates. His last paying concert was
in September of that year and he was thirty five.
At the age of thirty seven, he accepted the permanent
post of Kappameister, basically the person in charge of music
(19:09):
for the Grand Duke of Weimar. This position came with
a royal benefactor, Carl Alexander, to be his patron, so
he had the financial and social backing to just continue
his own work. Liz moved to Weimar and the Princess
later joined him there. In addition to his ongoing teaching
and composition, lists started trying to create new musical forms,
(19:30):
the most famous of these with the symphonic poem, which
is a musical piece that's meant to evoke or illustrate
a story or a piece of visual art. These compositions
were really groundbreaking and they attracted more music students he
wanted to learn from him. He dedicated most of his
music around this time to the Princess Caroline, and while
(19:50):
in Weimar, Liszt wrote what's considered to be his most
accomplished symphonic work, in faul Symphony or Faus Symphony. This
is essentially a series of in interconnected symphonic poems based
on Johann Wolfgang van gets tragic play. Faust Geta and
Schiller had both lived in Wemar, and Liz drew musical
inspiration from their literary work. His post as Capitalmeister also
(20:15):
meant that Liz was responsible for conducting the Vimar Orchestra,
and in doing so he really revolutionized what it meant
to conduct. Up until that point, the conductor was basically
a human metronome. He made sure that all of the
orchestra played in time with one another and that nobody
missed their cues. But List added gestures and expressions and
an emotive physical presence to guide what the orchestra should
(20:38):
sound like in the shape of the playing itself. And
this is pretty much taken for granted in the field
of conducting an orchestra today. That's how it works. At
the end of the eighteen fifties, life became more difficult
for lizz He resigned his post in Vimar in eighteen
fifty nine, and at that point two of his children
also died, one in that same year that he resigned,
(20:58):
and then another a few years later in eighteen sixty two.
He also got caught up in a musical feud known
as the War of the Romantics, and this pitted the
more romantically inclined musicians list in Richard Wagner against the
more conservative, classically inclined traditionalist faction of Robert Schumann, Felix
(21:18):
Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms. This was basically a dispute between
the more avant garde musical scene and the composers who
drew their influence from past masters like Boch, Mozart, and Beethoven.
This association with Wagner also meant that Liz developed a
reputation for having anti Semitic views, but their significant dispute
(21:39):
about whether quotations that were attributed to him in this
area of thought were accurate or they were not. Yeah,
at this point, Wagner is kind of notoriously anti Semitic
in his views, but I had a hard time confirming
exactly what Lists views were. So as his whole musical
(22:01):
schism was going on, List moved to Rome, where the
Princess Caroline had gone to try to get her previous
marriage annulled by the Pope. She Enlist hoped to get married,
but her annulment did not go through, so they did not,
and at this point Liz turned away from a lot
of the world. In eighteen sixty three, he moved to
an apartment at a monastery outside of Rome, and two
(22:23):
years later, in eighteen sixty five, he cut his hair
in a tonsure, so that's the shaving of the middle
part of the scalp that leaves a ring of hair
around it. At this point, he took holy orders that
same year, and he pursued an extensive study of theology
with the hope of joining the clergy, and although he
was never ordained, he did become an abbot and he
produced a number of religiously themed musical works. In eighteen seventy,
(22:48):
List returns to Hungary to visit, and while he was
away from Rome, Victor Emmanuel the second attempted to unify
all the Italian states and essentially laid siege to Rome.
Since he couldn't return, List remained in Hungary and accepted
a post at the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music
in Budapest, and today this is the Franz List Academy
of Music. For the last fifteen years of his life,
(23:12):
List divided his time among Budapest, Weimar, and Rome. He
continued to teach extensively and cultivated the idea of a
master class, and that's an idea that's continued to be
part of musical and other artistic education today. He taught
these demonstration based classes, he being the master of course
for free. He struggled with depression and failing health towards
(23:35):
the end of his life, and he died in Germany
on July thirty one, eighty six. By then, he had
composed about fourteen hundred works. Although he's pretty universally recognized
as a virtue of so piano player as well as
for his contributions to the art of conducting in the
idea of symphonic poems, there are still people that argue
(23:56):
that his skill as a composer was all hype. Yeah,
I've found several articles that were like, prize list, was
he really any good? I don't think so. That's always
the case with avant garde folks though, right, And it's
also the case with excessively pretty sulful looking people who
acquire an overly excited base of fans that like to
(24:20):
scream a lot, Right. I mean you could say that
of any person in the arts or anything really weird,
Like if they have really rabid fans, there's always gonna
be a kickback of like, no, they're not worth all
of that, even though they are super talented and amazing. Right,
people say that about the Beatles, and there it's like
they're plenty of arguments you can make about the Beatles
(24:41):
and what their influences are and whether this influence should
have gotten more attention, and whether all of their work
is really great, but really seriously, you can't just dismiss
the entirety of the Beatles because ladies were screaming about them. Yeah,
so they're also This whole phenomenon spawned a weird opera
about Froze List in the nineteen seventies that was called
(25:03):
list Domania. And there's also a song and album by
the band Phoenix that became very popular more much more recently. Um,
if you want to read all kinds of primary sources
about from Franz List, the Library of Congress has a
whole bunch of them. A bunch of them are on
the web. Pretty awfool. Do you also have listener mail
(25:23):
for us? Do? This is a listener mail. We're reading
one of it, but we have gotten several messages along
the same theme, so I'm not trying to pick on
one person. We've gotten several of these. I just picked
one of them to read. Uh, And this is from Ross,
and Ross says Hello. I love the show. I've been
listening since two thousand eight or so in the Sarah
and Dublina days and love the way that you present
(25:44):
most of the topics. I look forward to each episode.
I listened to your episode about Calamity Jane Today, in
which he complained about the man who gave you a
one star review because he said you had too many
episodes about women. I have two comments about your discussion
of this. One. You said that you only had five
episo ssodes about women in the last twenty and that
therefore you are not doing enough episodes about women, while
(26:05):
the five number is two. Is also unrepresentative because in
those twenty you had a number of episodes that were
about neither men nor women, like Peanut Butter Hippos account
exactly five episodes about men. More importantly, I would have
guessed that you had too many episodes about women too.
The reason for this is that when you guys do
episodes about women, you lose all objectivity. For men, you
(26:25):
present facts. For women, you guys celebrate her life, get excited,
offer commentary about how much you love her. This makes
those episodes much more noticeable, and for that reason I
sometimes skip your episodes that are likely to be like that.
In other words, episodes about men are history well, episodes
about women become a story. In all events, I would
agree with the commentator that you discussed, although certainly not
(26:46):
the one star review and suggest that either episodes about
men should be more exciting to you or you should
become more objective when you discussed women, and you certainly
should not do even more episodes about women when the
ratio of men and women in the twenty episodes of
that that you chose was one to one. Thank you, Ross.
So to clarify, since several people have had questions, um,
(27:10):
where we counted that twenty episodes was the twenty most
recent episodes since that person left that review, which I
remembered after having recorded that it was actually I think
a three star review and not a one star review,
and it was one of those. This would have been five.
But you're talking about too many women. So at the
point where we actually recorded the one about Calamity Jane,
(27:32):
we had already seen that review, laughed at it, and
started doing more women. So if you were counting back
from the Calamity Jane episode or from any other subset
like that, is not the same twenty episodes that we
were counting. UM. I would also argue that the Hippo
two parter is really about men because a huge part
of Yeah, it's those episodes. It's is like the biography
(27:53):
of the men in Bob. I mean, it's really almost
the life story of two men and sort of how
their lives in twine. Yeah. So the other thing is
that I would respectfully disagree that that we only talk
about women in an excited and hyping up their lives way.
I am reading it after we have this whole delight
(28:14):
about Franz List in his horrible uhs, I feel kind
of bad, like he's super just does remind me of
of the guy that you realized and you've grown was awful,
that you loved when you were in middle or high school.
So I really think whether we sound excited about somebody's
(28:34):
life and are hyping them up really depends on the context.
So like our episode on Frankie Manning, we talk a
bunch about loving Frankie, Yeah, we talked, especially you talk
about a bunch about loving Bella. But I can't help
but one of the unfortunate Yeah, one of the unfortunate
realities of our show though, is that, like we do
have a lot of episodes that are about upsetting events
(28:58):
in history, and one of the realities is that very
often the governments and large bodies that have been in
control of these horrible things that happened. We're primarily run
by men, and like we don't want to talk up
their lives because that thing was terrible. Like we also,
I mean, we do definitely have episodes that are about
(29:19):
women who did horrific things. We just had that one
about barry Anne Cotton, who was serious, I don't think
at any point where like she was sassy and great,
like she was horrible. So yeah, So number one to
clarify for the many many people who have who have
written in to be like I'd counted and I didn't
get that same number like we're probably unless you scrolled
(29:39):
back through all of our terrible reviews to find that
one and then counted from there. That's a different set
of plenty than our set of plenty. Uh. The thing
that I actually do think is responsible for people feeling
like there are too many women is a scientifically documented
phenomenon in which people generally overrepresent and their minds how
(30:00):
many women there actually are. Like one of the studies
that floats around all about this all the time is
from the Gina Davis Institute on Gender and Media, and
that one found that when you're looking at a crowd
scene in film, people interpret like women as half women
in crowd scenes, and if they're actually half women and
(30:22):
half men in the crowd scene, people interpret that is
like being way too many women. Um. But that same
pattern has played out in more real life studies of
actual behavior out in the world, not just in media representation.
So I think people remember a lot more women than
actually are on the show, except for lately, when we've
(30:43):
definitely done a whole whole bunch of women on purpose.
I'm still stuck on how I usually feel like I'm
terribly gushy, even over the men that we choose, like
we delighted in Diogenes, like there was no end to it. Yeah. So, anyway,
I have found the pattern seems to be three consecutive
(31:04):
episodes on like women or people of color or LGBT
people seems to be the tipping point when people get
really angry and and yell at us for only talking
about that now, uh, which I'm sort of like, too bad.
We're gonna keep talking about women and people of color
and LGBT people because the show is called Stuff you
(31:25):
Missed in History class, and we're mostly talking about stuff
that you missed in history class. I'm I'm debating over
whether we should point out that Ross was generally very Um. Yes, really,
I feel like I'm picking on Ross. I don't want
to feel like I'm picking on Ross. I'm like Ross
has the misfortune of being the one person of the
several several emails and tweets and Facebook comments that we
(31:46):
got about this that we chose to read. Thank you
for all of the kind things that you say. Ross. Seriously,
I'm I'm really not trying to embarrass you, but like
it did come up a bunch that we wanted to.
Part of it is his is articulate as well, so
it's it's a good example. Some of them were like,
it's not misogyny for meting a lot like things about women,
(32:07):
and I'm like, we never said that, but okay, Uh,
Ross did not say he was asking questions. This is
very conversational and good, like I said, articulate versus for
the alternates. M hmm. So okay, uh, thank you again. Ross.
You I'm I'm glad that you've liked the show for
so long. I'm glad that you like our show. I
respectfully disagree with the idea that we are only excited
(32:30):
about women. Uh So you'd like to write to us
about this or any other podcast can write history podcast
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(32:53):
have an Instagram on Instagram, we're all put miss in history.
So if you would like to learn more about what
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But in the word music you'll find all kinds of
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(33:18):
can do all of that and a whole lot more
at how stuff works dot com or missed at history
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Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class from dot Com. Hello,
and welcome to the podcast That's Crazy. B Wilson and
I'm Holly Frying. I have a confession to make of
a long holding jealousy. It's been with me quite a while.
(00:23):
I have always been jealous of Sarah and Bablina having
already covered the right of Spring riots on our podcast.
The whole story is just so weird they already covered
it back in so I've had my eye out for
some other kind of weird musical story to cover as
like a sad consolation prize. This is not a sad
(00:44):
consolation prize. This is actually awesome. It is about a
musical mass hysteria that is from the mid nineteenth century,
and that is list Omania. Yeah. Uh, it's delightful. I mean,
there's no way around it. I feel kind of sorry
for the guy, but at the same time it's pretty great.
So before we start, as as often happens, I need
(01:07):
a little note. So today, the word mania definitely has
psychological connotations, right. It's used to describe this excessively elevated
mood or really hyperactive mental state, and that can also
extend into like physical hyperactivity and other behaviors. And usually
it's used this way in the context of like bipolar disorder,
other mental and emotional disorders. And there are definitely folks
(01:29):
who would really prefer that the word mania not be
used to describe more generally just being really excited or busy.
But at the time when the word list domania was coined,
the word mania was really a physical description, it was
not a psychological one, and so list romania was considered
to be a frantic and dangerous physiological response to being
(01:51):
around France list And so when we use the word
mania in today's show, that is the context that we
are talking about. I can think of was all those
shots of the women in the crowd as the Beatles
landed in America. It's very similar. Well, and to be honest,
I saw the Boston Symphony, the Boston Pops specifically do
(02:14):
a whole night of the Beatles, and um, it was amazing.
I was. I was really there to see John Hodgman
do what's it called the Introduction to Orchestra for young people.
Oh yeah, that Yeah, it was hilarious and there was
a there was a narration through the whole thing that
talked about among other things, Beatlemania, and I had this
movement where I was like, what if we did a
(02:35):
podcast on beatle Maia, and I couldn't figure out a
way to make that feel legitimate. So this feels a
lot more legitimate and also very fun. So to give
you a little bit of background and set this up,
Franz List was born in Devoreon, Hungary, which is now Raiding, Austria,
(02:56):
although it is still referred to as Devoreon if you
speak Hungarian, on October eighteen eleven, and the Boreon at
the time was rather small. It was basically a market
town and most of the people who lived there were
both German speaking and ethnically Hungarian or MegaR. Liszt was
the only child of Adam Liszt and Anna Maria Lager.
(03:18):
Adam List worked as a clerk for Prince Nicholas esther Hazy,
who was a musical patron and a lists father was
also an amateur musician who could play several different instruments,
including the cello and the piano. Franz lists father had
also spent two years in the Franciscan Order, so Franz
grew into a religiously pretty devoted child. Liz already showed
(03:42):
a really distinct love of music by the age of six,
and his father started to give him music lessons. Franz
was just enormously talented, and he really progressed in his
musical study extremely quickly. By the time he was nine,
he was giving public performances as a concert pianist, and
after his first performance, local big wigs actually donated money
to fund the next several years of his musical education. Soon,
(04:06):
his prodigious ability outstripped the resources that were available in
De Boreon, so liszts father asked for an extended leave
of absence from his employer and took Franz to Vienna.
There he studied piano with Carl Cherney, who himself had
studied with Ludwig von Beethoven. Liszt also studied composition with
(04:27):
Antonio Salieri, who was much more famous for his relationship
with and rivalry with Mozart. Both of these two teachers
were so impressed with liszts talent that they refused to
be paid for their work with him. Franz's first public
performance in Vienna was in eighteen twenty two, so he
would have been about eleven years old at this time,
(04:48):
and he was described as quote a little hercules fallen
from the clouds. He started writing his own compositions that
same year. The next year, Franz met Lidwig on Beethoven
for the first time, and according to one possibly apocryphal account,
Beethoven was so charmed that he kissed him on the forehead.
(05:10):
Three was also the year that Lizt moved to Paris.
This move was another one that was made so that
he could continue his studies with other musical masters. And
while the Paris Conservatory declined to admit him on the
grounds that he was not French, check composer Anton Russia
and Italian composer Fernando Paier taught him privately. In addition
(05:30):
to his studies, he put on extensive public performances and
he really started to develop quite a following. However, in
eighteen six, when he was fifteen years old, Franz's father
died suddenly of typhoid. His father had really been his
primary source of support during all of this musical training
and performing, Plus the boy was only fifteen years old.
(05:52):
He had not always had good health up until this point,
and this whole theories of touring and studying had been
really fatiguing. After his father's death, Franz had to share
a one bedroom apartment with his mother, and, grieving and exhausted,
he turned to teaching piano to try to make a living.
He actually fell in love with one of his students.
(06:14):
She's going to set a trend for his later life.
When her father forced him to end their relationship, he
became so ill that newspapers printed obituaries for him. Afterward,
he retreated from public performance for almost four years, and
he spent most of this time reading and teaching music.
(06:35):
He started to compose music again in eighteen thirty following
the July Revolution in which King Charles the tenth was
overthrown and succeeded by Louis Philippe. In his mother's words
quote the cannons cured him, and afterward he met several
more famous names in the musical world, including Hector Berlioz,
Niccolo Paganini, and Frederic Chopin. Liszt met the married Comtesse
(06:58):
Marie Dagou in eighteen thirty three, when he was twenty
two years old. In spite of her being married, he
fell in love with her and they were to be
together for twelve years. They eventually had three children together.
To avoid the scorn of Parisian society over this affair
with a married woman, they left and spent the next
four years traveling through Europe, including Switzerland, Italy, and other
(07:22):
non Paris parts of France. His travels and his love
for her started to inspire him to compose, and he
wrote a set of sweets for solo piano, which became
the highly praised A ned de pillery Nage. Over the
next few years, lists reputation as a musician grew just dramatically.
He gave tours and performances and really made a name
(07:45):
for himself as a virtuoso composer and pianist, and as
well as an extremely charismatic and very expressive performer. He
also became known for being quite generous with his music
and his time. He often taught people and also exce
did official posts for free, so we thought, all this
without pay, and then he would donate the proceeds from
(08:06):
his concerts to charity. He also developed a different reputation
thanks to his behavior off stage. James Honker's nineteen eleven biography,
in chapter two, which is called Aspects of his art
and character begins lists and the ladies. It's like this
is like the heading, so it's like one list and
(08:27):
the lady. The feminine friendships of Franz List gained for
him as much notoriety as his music making. To the
average public, he was a compound of Casanova, Byron and Gheta,
and to this mixture could have been added the name
of Stendhow lists, love affairs, lists, children lists, perilous escape
(08:48):
from daggers, pistols and poisons were the subjects of conversation
in Europe three quarters of a century ago. As earlier,
Byron was both hero and black sheep in the current
gossip of his time. Let's just add to the subjects
of conversation right now that he was also extremely attractive,
Like I'm having trouble picking out which extremely attractive picture
(09:11):
of Fronz List should accompany our blog post, in our
show notes and and the episode itself, because there are many.
And he looks like he looks like the boy at
your high school who was very sensitive and soulful and
wrote terrible poetry and made all of the girls think
that he was just so tragically attractive Like that, that's
(09:33):
what he looked like, yeah, he looks like every guy
in every Um movie about teenage forlornness as well that like,
he's so beautiful, no one will ever understand him. Yep,
I'm not. He is a pretty thing. I mean, he's
very beautiful. So basically this all meant that Bronze List
(09:56):
was a nineteenth century virtuo so piano rock star him.
That's where this mania comes in. We're going to talk
about after a brief word from a sponsor, So two
understand this mania that erupted around Franz List. Let's start
by talking about what he was like in concert. Here
(10:16):
is a description written by Hans Christian Anderson of all people.
As List sat before the piano, the first impression of
his personality was derived from the appearance of strong passions
in his land face, so that he seems to me
a demon nailed fast to the instrument. Once his tones
streamed forth, they came from his blood, from his thoughts.
(10:38):
He was a demon who would liberate his soul from
the thralldom. He was on the rack, his blood flowed
and his nerves trembled. But as he continued to play,
so the demon vanished. I saw that pale face assume
a nobler and brighter expression. The divine soul shone from
his eyes from every feature, he became as beauteous as
(11:01):
only spirit and enthusiasm can make their worshippers really, Liz
had been breaking new ground in his concert performances. It
was not at this point common for just a man
and a piano to have a whole stage to himself,
but Liz did basically invent this sort of recital as
a performance format, and it definitely wasn't common for someone
(11:23):
to play the piano like a demon turned divine. The
whole performance was so enormously expressive and a motive, and
the audience tended to really just get caught up in it.
On top of that, this played with the piano in
profile so that people could see his face while he played,
and he would whip his kind of longish hair around
(11:44):
as he was playing, which was very striking. He also
played all of his music from memory, which a lot
of other musicians of the day thought was extremely rude,
especially when you were playing work that someone else had written,
which could make people think that you had actually written
it herself. On December one, Franz List played the first
(12:06):
concert in what would be a ten week tour of Germany,
and the audience was overcome. Women shrieked and swooned, and
there was a general atmosphere of rapturous chaos and from
the men jealousy. It got weirder from there. People started
wearing lockets and brooches that had its face on them,
(12:26):
which is not that weird. I mean, it's not that
much different from having a T shirt with your favorite
boy band face on it. Women, however, started carrying vials
with them in case Franz List walked away from some
night not quite empty cup of coffee, so they could
like spirit away the unconsumed dregs of his coffee and
(12:47):
then carry it around with them. In that vile people
scavenged his old coffee grounds and cigar butts. Also, there's
even one story of a lady in waiting having one
of his discarded cig our butts encased in a locket
that had his initials and jewels on the front. I
love it. I mean that one makes perfect sense to me.
(13:09):
Remember that Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton were walking
around with bials of one another's blood. Yes, it was
like that. I get it. Uh. Women would literally attack
List when this mania was going on, so they would
tear off parts of his clothes, they would try to
snip pieces of his hair, and they would fight one
another for their spoils. He'd throw gloves and handkerchiefs into
(13:33):
the audience after performances, and the scene would devolve into fisticuffs,
sometimes with the articles that people were fighting over being
torn to bits in the process. His manner of playing
the piano was also very prone to breaking strings, and
women would scavenge those broken springs also and then make
them into bracelets, which is one of the less weird
(13:54):
parts of all of it. I love that. I love
a little crafty fandom. And yes, in case you're wondering,
there are reports of women throwing their garments onto the stage,
including their undergarments, although this is disputed as to whether
or not its fact or fancy. So although most of
the list domania behavior has attributed to women, men definitely
(14:17):
did get on the action to some of them in
their own excitement and some of them in the form
of fighting one another in fits of jealousy. It was
poet and journalist Heinrich Heina who coined the word Liz
Domeny on April four, at which point Liz had actually
moved on to Paris. And at first Hina actually thought
(14:38):
this whole phenomenon was a result of social and legal expectations.
In Germany. It was culturally more reserved than Paris, with
a more stringent law enforcement. So his supposition was that
people were taking this opportunity to legally blow off steam
where they could. But then Franzlist came to Paris, where
people were a lot freer, there was a lot more
(15:00):
social wiggle room. The exact same thing happened, uh, And
he wrote quite a lot about it. We're not going
to read all of it, but we are going to
read kind of a lengthy bit of Heina's description, which
goes strange. Thought. I these Parisians who have seen Napoleon,
who had to win one battle after another to hold
(15:21):
their attention, Now they are claiming our franz List. And
what in a claim? It was a veritable insanity, one
unheard of in the annals of fur Or what is
the reason of this phenomenon? The solution of this question
belongs to the domain of pathology rather than that of esthetics.
A physician whose specialty is female diseases, and whom I
(15:44):
asked to explain the magic our List exerted upon his public,
smiled in the strangest manner, and at the same time
said all sorts of things about magnetism, galvinism, electricity, of
the contagion of a close haul filled with countless wax
lights and several hundred perfumed and perspiring human beings, of
(16:05):
historical epilepsy, of the phenomenon of tickling, of musical canthrides,
and other scabbarous things which I believe have reference to
the mysteries of the bonadilla. Perhaps the solution of the
question is not buried in such adventurous depths, but floats
on a very prosaic surface. It seems to me at
(16:27):
times that all this sorcery may be explained by the
fact that no one on earth knows, uh knows so
well how to organize his successes or raise their mais
en as our Frand's list in this art. He is
a genius. As we said at the top of the show,
the medical establishment thought this was a contagious, dangerous physical
(16:51):
syndrome that could actually be passed from one overwrought lady
to another. They feared an epidemic. So basically, people have
been pathologizing young women being really excited about music for
almost a hundred and seventy five years. That wasn't new
with the Beatles, No, not new with any boy bands
since then, all the way back to franz List, maybe
(17:14):
even before. It's possible that there were similar stories and
other cultures. All of the resources I had in my
disposal were about like the Western musical tradition. Who knows,
so actually this whole thing kind of plagued franz List.
Other musicians were absolutely appalled at the audience's behavior, including
really famous names like Chopin and Schumann and Mendelssohn. A
(17:37):
lot of people in the musical world really started to
dislike franz List based on what they saw is this vulgar,
needless hero worship that was undecorous and dangerous, And lists
own correspondence sounds vaguely baffled at this pattern. I mean,
he was obviously doing some things to encourage it, like
on purpose throwing gloves and handkerchiefs into the audience, but
(18:00):
he really still didn't seem to quite fathom the extent
of everybody's intensity. But just like Beatlemania, spice Girlmania and
beaver Fever, it eventually subsided. We're going to talk about
that some more after we have a quick word from
one of our fabulous sponsors. So to get to the
end of liszt Domania and the end of frons less life.
(18:24):
In eighty seven, List met Princess Caroline's son Wittgenstein, and
he met her in Kiev and they started a relationship,
and she, like his previous long term love affair, was married.
The princess wanted him to stop touring and settle down
and focus on teaching and composing instead, and so while
he and the previous his previous love interest to contest
(18:48):
had needed to escape Paris and scandal, instead, List was
installed in the Princess's estates. His last paying concert was
in September of that year and he was thirty five.
At the age of thirty seven, he accepted the permanent
post of Kappameister, basically the person in charge of music
(19:09):
for the Grand Duke of Weimar. This position came with
a royal benefactor, Carl Alexander, to be his patron, so
he had the financial and social backing to just continue
his own work. Liz moved to Weimar and the Princess
later joined him there. In addition to his ongoing teaching
and composition, lists started trying to create new musical forms,
(19:30):
the most famous of these with the symphonic poem, which
is a musical piece that's meant to evoke or illustrate
a story or a piece of visual art. These compositions
were really groundbreaking and they attracted more music students he
wanted to learn from him. He dedicated most of his
music around this time to the Princess Caroline, and while
(19:50):
in Weimar, Liszt wrote what's considered to be his most
accomplished symphonic work, in faul Symphony or Faus Symphony. This
is essentially a series of in interconnected symphonic poems based
on Johann Wolfgang van gets tragic play. Faust Geta and
Schiller had both lived in Wemar, and Liz drew musical
inspiration from their literary work. His post as Capitalmeister also
(20:15):
meant that Liz was responsible for conducting the Vimar Orchestra,
and in doing so he really revolutionized what it meant
to conduct. Up until that point, the conductor was basically
a human metronome. He made sure that all of the
orchestra played in time with one another and that nobody
missed their cues. But List added gestures and expressions and
an emotive physical presence to guide what the orchestra should
(20:38):
sound like in the shape of the playing itself. And
this is pretty much taken for granted in the field
of conducting an orchestra today. That's how it works. At
the end of the eighteen fifties, life became more difficult
for lizz He resigned his post in Vimar in eighteen
fifty nine, and at that point two of his children
also died, one in that same year that he resigned,
(20:58):
and then another a few years later in eighteen sixty two.
He also got caught up in a musical feud known
as the War of the Romantics, and this pitted the
more romantically inclined musicians list in Richard Wagner against the
more conservative, classically inclined traditionalist faction of Robert Schumann, Felix
(21:18):
Mendelssohn and Johannes Brahms. This was basically a dispute between
the more avant garde musical scene and the composers who
drew their influence from past masters like Boch, Mozart, and Beethoven.
This association with Wagner also meant that Liz developed a
reputation for having anti Semitic views, but their significant dispute
(21:39):
about whether quotations that were attributed to him in this
area of thought were accurate or they were not. Yeah,
at this point, Wagner is kind of notoriously anti Semitic
in his views, but I had a hard time confirming
exactly what Lists views were. So as his whole musical
(22:01):
schism was going on, List moved to Rome, where the
Princess Caroline had gone to try to get her previous
marriage annulled by the Pope. She Enlist hoped to get married,
but her annulment did not go through, so they did not,
and at this point Liz turned away from a lot
of the world. In eighteen sixty three, he moved to
an apartment at a monastery outside of Rome, and two
(22:23):
years later, in eighteen sixty five, he cut his hair
in a tonsure, so that's the shaving of the middle
part of the scalp that leaves a ring of hair
around it. At this point, he took holy orders that
same year, and he pursued an extensive study of theology
with the hope of joining the clergy, and although he
was never ordained, he did become an abbot and he
produced a number of religiously themed musical works. In eighteen seventy,
(22:48):
List returns to Hungary to visit, and while he was
away from Rome, Victor Emmanuel the second attempted to unify
all the Italian states and essentially laid siege to Rome.
Since he couldn't return, List remained in Hungary and accepted
a post at the Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music
in Budapest, and today this is the Franz List Academy
of Music. For the last fifteen years of his life,
(23:12):
List divided his time among Budapest, Weimar, and Rome. He
continued to teach extensively and cultivated the idea of a
master class, and that's an idea that's continued to be
part of musical and other artistic education today. He taught
these demonstration based classes, he being the master of course
for free. He struggled with depression and failing health towards
(23:35):
the end of his life, and he died in Germany
on July thirty one, eighty six. By then, he had
composed about fourteen hundred works. Although he's pretty universally recognized
as a virtue of so piano player as well as
for his contributions to the art of conducting in the
idea of symphonic poems, there are still people that argue
(23:56):
that his skill as a composer was all hype. Yeah,
I've found several articles that were like, prize list, was
he really any good? I don't think so. That's always
the case with avant garde folks though, right, And it's
also the case with excessively pretty sulful looking people who
acquire an overly excited base of fans that like to
(24:20):
scream a lot, Right. I mean you could say that
of any person in the arts or anything really weird,
Like if they have really rabid fans, there's always gonna
be a kickback of like, no, they're not worth all
of that, even though they are super talented and amazing. Right,
people say that about the Beatles, and there it's like
they're plenty of arguments you can make about the Beatles
(24:41):
and what their influences are and whether this influence should
have gotten more attention, and whether all of their work
is really great, but really seriously, you can't just dismiss
the entirety of the Beatles because ladies were screaming about them. Yeah,
so they're also This whole phenomenon spawned a weird opera
about Froze List in the nineteen seventies that was called
(25:03):
list Domania. And there's also a song and album by
the band Phoenix that became very popular more much more recently. Um,
if you want to read all kinds of primary sources
about from Franz List, the Library of Congress has a
whole bunch of them. A bunch of them are on
the web. Pretty awfool. Do you also have listener mail
(25:23):
for us? Do? This is a listener mail. We're reading
one of it, but we have gotten several messages along
the same theme, so I'm not trying to pick on
one person. We've gotten several of these. I just picked
one of them to read. Uh, And this is from Ross,
and Ross says Hello. I love the show. I've been
listening since two thousand eight or so in the Sarah
and Dublina days and love the way that you present
(25:44):
most of the topics. I look forward to each episode.
I listened to your episode about Calamity Jane Today, in
which he complained about the man who gave you a
one star review because he said you had too many
episodes about women. I have two comments about your discussion
of this. One. You said that you only had five
episo ssodes about women in the last twenty and that
therefore you are not doing enough episodes about women, while
(26:05):
the five number is two. Is also unrepresentative because in
those twenty you had a number of episodes that were
about neither men nor women, like Peanut Butter Hippos account
exactly five episodes about men. More importantly, I would have
guessed that you had too many episodes about women too.
The reason for this is that when you guys do
episodes about women, you lose all objectivity. For men, you
(26:25):
present facts. For women, you guys celebrate her life, get excited,
offer commentary about how much you love her. This makes
those episodes much more noticeable, and for that reason I
sometimes skip your episodes that are likely to be like that.
In other words, episodes about men are history well, episodes
about women become a story. In all events, I would
agree with the commentator that you discussed, although certainly not
(26:46):
the one star review and suggest that either episodes about
men should be more exciting to you or you should
become more objective when you discussed women, and you certainly
should not do even more episodes about women when the
ratio of men and women in the twenty episodes of
that that you chose was one to one. Thank you, Ross.
So to clarify, since several people have had questions, um,
(27:10):
where we counted that twenty episodes was the twenty most
recent episodes since that person left that review, which I
remembered after having recorded that it was actually I think
a three star review and not a one star review,
and it was one of those. This would have been five.
But you're talking about too many women. So at the
point where we actually recorded the one about Calamity Jane,
(27:32):
we had already seen that review, laughed at it, and
started doing more women. So if you were counting back
from the Calamity Jane episode or from any other subset
like that, is not the same twenty episodes that we
were counting. UM. I would also argue that the Hippo
two parter is really about men because a huge part
of Yeah, it's those episodes. It's is like the biography
(27:53):
of the men in Bob. I mean, it's really almost
the life story of two men and sort of how
their lives in twine. Yeah. So the other thing is
that I would respectfully disagree that that we only talk
about women in an excited and hyping up their lives way.
I am reading it after we have this whole delight
(28:14):
about Franz List in his horrible uhs, I feel kind
of bad, like he's super just does remind me of
of the guy that you realized and you've grown was awful,
that you loved when you were in middle or high school.
So I really think whether we sound excited about somebody's
(28:34):
life and are hyping them up really depends on the context.
So like our episode on Frankie Manning, we talk a
bunch about loving Frankie, Yeah, we talked, especially you talk
about a bunch about loving Bella. But I can't help
but one of the unfortunate Yeah, one of the unfortunate
realities of our show though, is that, like we do
have a lot of episodes that are about upsetting events
(28:58):
in history, and one of the realities is that very
often the governments and large bodies that have been in
control of these horrible things that happened. We're primarily run
by men, and like we don't want to talk up
their lives because that thing was terrible. Like we also,
I mean, we do definitely have episodes that are about
(29:19):
women who did horrific things. We just had that one
about barry Anne Cotton, who was serious, I don't think
at any point where like she was sassy and great,
like she was horrible. So yeah, So number one to
clarify for the many many people who have who have
written in to be like I'd counted and I didn't
get that same number like we're probably unless you scrolled
(29:39):
back through all of our terrible reviews to find that
one and then counted from there. That's a different set
of plenty than our set of plenty. Uh. The thing
that I actually do think is responsible for people feeling
like there are too many women is a scientifically documented
phenomenon in which people generally overrepresent and their minds how
(30:00):
many women there actually are. Like one of the studies
that floats around all about this all the time is
from the Gina Davis Institute on Gender and Media, and
that one found that when you're looking at a crowd
scene in film, people interpret like women as half women
in crowd scenes, and if they're actually half women and
(30:22):
half men in the crowd scene, people interpret that is
like being way too many women. Um. But that same
pattern has played out in more real life studies of
actual behavior out in the world, not just in media representation.
So I think people remember a lot more women than
actually are on the show, except for lately, when we've
(30:43):
definitely done a whole whole bunch of women on purpose.
I'm still stuck on how I usually feel like I'm
terribly gushy, even over the men that we choose, like
we delighted in Diogenes, like there was no end to it. Yeah. So, anyway,
I have found the pattern seems to be three consecutive
(31:04):
episodes on like women or people of color or LGBT
people seems to be the tipping point when people get
really angry and and yell at us for only talking
about that now, uh, which I'm sort of like, too bad.
We're gonna keep talking about women and people of color
and LGBT people because the show is called Stuff you
(31:25):
Missed in History class, and we're mostly talking about stuff
that you missed in history class. I'm I'm debating over
whether we should point out that Ross was generally very Um. Yes, really,
I feel like I'm picking on Ross. I don't want
to feel like I'm picking on Ross. I'm like Ross
has the misfortune of being the one person of the
several several emails and tweets and Facebook comments that we
(31:46):
got about this that we chose to read. Thank you
for all of the kind things that you say. Ross. Seriously,
I'm I'm really not trying to embarrass you, but like
it did come up a bunch that we wanted to.
Part of it is his is articulate as well, so
it's it's a good example. Some of them were like,
it's not misogyny for meting a lot like things about women,
(32:07):
and I'm like, we never said that, but okay, Uh,
Ross did not say he was asking questions. This is
very conversational and good, like I said, articulate versus for
the alternates. M hmm. So okay, uh, thank you again. Ross.
You I'm I'm glad that you've liked the show for
so long. I'm glad that you like our show. I
respectfully disagree with the idea that we are only excited
(32:30):
about women. Uh So you'd like to write to us
about this or any other podcast can write history podcast
the House deftworks dot com. We're also on Facebook and
Facebook dot com slash miss in history and on Twitter
it missed the History. Our tumbler is missing history dot
tumbler dot com, and you're we're also on Pinterest at
pinchest dot com slash miss in history. You have a
spreadshirt store at missing history dot spreadshirt dot com. We
(32:53):
have an Instagram on Instagram, we're all put miss in history.
So if you would like to learn more about what
we've taught, what we talked about the day him to
our parent company's website, which is how stuff works dot com.
But in the word music you'll find all kinds of
various articles about how music works. You can also come
to our website where we're gonna have show notes. We're
gonna have an archive every episode ever, We're gonna have
multiple pictures of Bran's list because I would. So you
(33:18):
can do all of that and a whole lot more
at how stuff works dot com or missed at history
dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
is it how stuff works dot com
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