January 19, 2019 • 27 mins
This 2015 episode is all about pianist, composer and conductor Franz Liszt. He was 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.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Hey, everybody, Happy Saturday. Coming up next week on the show,
we are going to talk about a famous concert pianist
and making an appearance in that episode. Brief but important
is Fran's List. So it seems like a great time
to revisit one of our favorite past episodes about some
nineteenth century fandom, and that is Listomania. Just a quick note,
(00:22):
if this episode sounds a little different to you from
how our episodes have been sounding, it's just from an
earlier era that was recorded and produced at a slightly
different quality level. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in
History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and
(00:49):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Crazy v 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.
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
(01:11):
it back in twentyn 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 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,
(01:34):
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
a little note. So today, the word mania definitely has
psychological connotations, right, It's used to describe this s excessively
elevated mood or really hyperactive mental state, and that can
(01:54):
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 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
(02:15):
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 around Franz List. And so when
we use the word mania in today's show. That is
the context that we are talking about. All I can
(02:36):
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 uh 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
(02:59):
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 podcast on beatle Maia? And I
couldn't figure out a way to make that feel legitimate.
(03:20):
So this feels a lot more legitimate and also very fun.
So to give you a little bit of background and
set this up, Fran's List was born in Devoreon, Hungary,
which is now Raiding Austria, although it is still referred
to as Devoreon if you speak Hungarian, on October eighteen eleven,
and de Boreon at the time was rather small. It
(03:41):
was basically a market town, and most of the people
who lived there were both German speaking and ethnically Hungarian
or MegaR. List was the only child of Adam List
and Anna Maria Lager. Adam List worked as a clerk
for Prince Nicholas esther Hassi, who was a music old
patron and a Liszts father was also an amateur musician
(04:04):
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 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,
(04:26):
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, his prodigious ability
outstripped the resources that were available in de Boreon, so
(04:48):
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 Antonio Salieri, who
was much more famous for his relationship with and rivalry
(05:08):
with Mozart. Both of these two teachers were so impressed
with Lizz's 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, and he was
described as quote a little Hercules fallen from the clouds.
(05:31):
He started writing his own compositions that same year. The
next year, Franz met Ludwig von Beethoven for the first time,
and according to one possibly apocryphal account, Beethoven was so
charmed that he kissed him on the forehead. Three was
also the year that Lizt moved to Paris. This move
was another one that was made so that he could
(05:52):
continue his studies with other musical masters, and while the
Paris Conservatory declined to admit him on the grounds that
he was not friend. Check composer Anton Russia and Italian
composer Fernando Pier taught him privately. In addition to his studies,
he put on extensive public performances, and he really started
to develop quite a following. However, in eighteen twenty six,
(06:15):
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. He had
not always had good health up until this point, and
this whole theories of touring and studying had been really fatiguing.
(06:38):
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.
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,
(07:04):
he retreated from public performance for almost four years, and
he spent most of this time reading and teaching music.
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
(07:27):
famous names in the musical world, including Hector Berlioz, Niccolo Paganini,
and Frederic Chopin. Liszt met the married Comtesse Marie Dagoux
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
(07:49):
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 non Paris. Parts of 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
(08:11):
Pillery nag. Over the next few years, lists reputation as
a musician grew just dramatically. He gave tours and performances
and really made a name 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
(08:34):
taught people and also accepted official posts for free, so
he dealt all this without pay, and then he would
donate the proceeds from 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
(08:54):
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 the ladies. 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
(09:18):
could have been added the name of stendhow lists, love affairs, lists,
children lists, perilous escape 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. He was
(09:39):
also extremely attractive. Like I'm having trouble picking out which
extremely attractive picture of franz 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. He was very sensitive
(10:00):
and soulful and wrote terrible poetry and made all of
the girls think that he was just so tragically attractive
like that, that's 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 I'm kidding. He is
(10:24):
a pretty thing. I mean, he's very beautiful. So basically
this all meant that Bronze List was a nineteenth century
virtuo so piano rock star. And that's where this mania
comes in. We're going to talk about after a brief
word from a sponsor. So to understand this mania that
(10:56):
erupted around Fronze List, let's start by talking about what
he is like in concert. Here's any scription written by
Hans Christian Anderson of all people. As Lists 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
(11:17):
to the instrument. Whence his tones streamed forth. They came
from his blood, from his thoughts. 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 assumed a nobler and brighter expression.
(11:40):
The divine soul shone from his eyes. From every feature,
he became as beauteous as 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 age to himself, But Liz did basically invent
(12:03):
this sort of recital as a performance format, and it
definitely wasn't common for someone 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,
List played with the piano in profile so that people
could see his face while he played, and he would
(12:26):
whip his kind of longish hair around 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 yourself. On
(12:47):
decembert one, Franz Liszt played the first 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
(13:10):
brooches that had his face on them, 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 From's 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 then carry it
(13:34):
around with them in that vial. 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
cigar butts encased in a locket that had his initials
and jewels on the front. I love it. I mean
that makes perfect sense to me. Do you remember that
(13:55):
Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton were walking around with
vials 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 the audience
(14:19):
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 last weirds of
(14:40):
all of them. 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 did
(15:03):
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 dominy
on April four, at which point Liz had actually moved
on to Paris. And at first Hina actually thought this
(15:23):
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 Franzist came to Paris, where
people were a lot freer, there was a lot more
(15:45):
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. These Parisians who have seen Napoleon, who
had to win one battle after another to hold their attention,
(16:07):
now they are claiming our franz List, and what in
acclaim 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 asked to
(16:30):
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 historical epilepsy,
(16:52):
of the phenomenon of tickling of musical canthriads, and other
scabbarous things which I believe you 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 times
(17:13):
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 franz 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 syndrome
(17:37):
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. No, all
(17:57):
the way back to franz List, maybe 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
(18:19):
like Chopin and Schumann and Mendelssohn. A lot of people
in the musical world really started to dislike frands 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
(18:42):
throwing gloves and handkerchiefs into the audience, but he really
still didn't seem to quite fathom the extent of everybody's intensity.
But just like Beatlemania, Spice Girlmania and beaber Fever, it
eventually subsided. We're gonna talk about that some more after
we have a quick word from one of our fabulous sponsors.
(19:11):
So to get to the end of list Domania and
the end of brons lists life. 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
(19:33):
teaching and composing instead, and so while he and the
previous his previous love interest, the Contests 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
(19:55):
of thirty seven, he accepted the permanent post of Kapameister,
basically the person in charge of music 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.
(20:16):
In addition to his ongoing teaching and composition, Lists started
trying to create new musical forms, the most famous of
these with the symphonic poem, which is a musical piecet
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.
(20:37):
He dedicated most of his music around this time to
the Princess Caroline, and while in Weimar, Liszt wrote what's
considered to be his most accomplished symphonic work in Faus
Symphony or Faus Symphony. This is essentially a series of
interconnected symphonic poems based on Johann Wolfgang van Getta's tragic
play Faust. Geta and Schiller had both lived in wim Are,
(21:00):
and Liz drew musical inspiration from their literary work. His
post as Capitalmeister also 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
(21:21):
another and that nobody missed their cues. But list added
gestures and expressions and in emotive physical presence to guide
what the orchestra should 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,
(21:41):
life became more difficult for Liz. He resigned his post
and VIMR in eighteen fifty nine, and at that point
two of his children also died, one in that same
year that he resigned, 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
(22:02):
Richard Wagner against the more conservative, classically inclined traditionalist faction
of Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelsohn, 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 Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. This association with Wagner also
(22:26):
meant that Liz developed a reputation for having anti Semitic views,
but their significant dispute 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
(22:52):
as this whole musical schism was going on, Lists 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
(23:13):
monastery outside of Rome, and two 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
(23:35):
become an abbot and he produced a number of religiously
themed musical works. In eighteen seventy, List returned 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
(23:55):
Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest, and today
this is the Unlist Academy of Music. For the last
fifteen years of his life, 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
(24:17):
education today. He taught these demonstration based classes, he being
the master, of course, for free. He struggled with depression
and failing health towards the end of his life, and
he died in Germany on July thirty one, eight six.
By then, he had composed about fourteen hundred works. Although
(24:38):
he's pretty universally recognized as a virtuos piano player as
well as for his contributions to the art of conducting
and the idea of symphonic poems, there are still people
that argue that his skill as a composer was all hype. Yeah.
I found several articles that were like, fri List, was
he really any good? I don't think so. That's always
(24:59):
the case with avant garde folks though, right well, and
it's also the case with excessively pretty soulful looking people
who acquire an overly excited base of fans that like
to scream a lot, right, I mean you could say
that of any person in the arts or anything really weird,
(25:20):
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 if they are super talented and amazing, Right,
people say that about the Beatles, and there it's like,
there are plenty of arguments you can make about the
Beatles 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
(25:42):
dismiss the entirety of the Beatles because ladies were screaming
about them. Yeah, so they're also this whole phenomenon spawned
a weird rock opera about problem List in the nineteen
seventies that was called list Romania. And there's also a
song and album by the band Nix that became very
popular more much more recently. Um, if you want to
(26:04):
read all kinds of primary sources about Bronze List, the
Library of Congress has a whole bunch of them, a
bunch of them are on the web. Pretty aw cool.
Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday.
If you have heard an email address or a Facebook
(26:25):
you are l or something similar over the course of
today's episode, since it is from the archive that might
be out of date. Now, you can email us at
history podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in History.
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
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(26:45):
you listen to podcasts. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com.
Hey, everybody, Happy Saturday. Coming up next week on the show,
we are going to talk about a famous concert pianist
and making an appearance in that episode. Brief but important
is Fran's List. So it seems like a great time
to revisit one of our favorite past episodes about some
nineteenth century fandom, and that is Listomania. Just a quick note,
(00:22):
if this episode sounds a little different to you from
how our episodes have been sounding, it's just from an
earlier era that was recorded and produced at a slightly
different quality level. Enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in
History Class from how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and
(00:49):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Crazy v 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.
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
(01:11):
it back in twentyn 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 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,
(01:34):
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
a little note. So today, the word mania definitely has
psychological connotations, right, It's used to describe this s excessively
elevated mood or really hyperactive mental state, and that can
(01:54):
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 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
(02:15):
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 around Franz List. And so when
we use the word mania in today's show. That is
the context that we are talking about. All I can
(02:36):
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 uh 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
(02:59):
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 podcast on beatle Maia? And I
couldn't figure out a way to make that feel legitimate.
(03:20):
So this feels a lot more legitimate and also very fun.
So to give you a little bit of background and
set this up, Fran's List was born in Devoreon, Hungary,
which is now Raiding Austria, although it is still referred
to as Devoreon if you speak Hungarian, on October eighteen eleven,
and de Boreon at the time was rather small. It
(03:41):
was basically a market town, and most of the people
who lived there were both German speaking and ethnically Hungarian
or MegaR. List was the only child of Adam List
and Anna Maria Lager. Adam List worked as a clerk
for Prince Nicholas esther Hassi, who was a music old
patron and a Liszts father was also an amateur musician
(04:04):
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 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,
(04:26):
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, his prodigious ability
outstripped the resources that were available in de Boreon, so
(04:48):
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 Antonio Salieri, who
was much more famous for his relationship with and rivalry
(05:08):
with Mozart. Both of these two teachers were so impressed
with Lizz's 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, and he was
described as quote a little Hercules fallen from the clouds.
(05:31):
He started writing his own compositions that same year. The
next year, Franz met Ludwig von Beethoven for the first time,
and according to one possibly apocryphal account, Beethoven was so
charmed that he kissed him on the forehead. Three was
also the year that Lizt moved to Paris. This move
was another one that was made so that he could
(05:52):
continue his studies with other musical masters, and while the
Paris Conservatory declined to admit him on the grounds that
he was not friend. Check composer Anton Russia and Italian
composer Fernando Pier taught him privately. In addition to his studies,
he put on extensive public performances, and he really started
to develop quite a following. However, in eighteen twenty six,
(06:15):
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. He had
not always had good health up until this point, and
this whole theories of touring and studying had been really fatiguing.
(06:38):
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.
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,
(07:04):
he retreated from public performance for almost four years, and
he spent most of this time reading and teaching music.
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
(07:27):
famous names in the musical world, including Hector Berlioz, Niccolo Paganini,
and Frederic Chopin. Liszt met the married Comtesse Marie Dagoux
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
(07:49):
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 non Paris. Parts of 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
(08:11):
Pillery nag. Over the next few years, lists reputation as
a musician grew just dramatically. He gave tours and performances
and really made a name 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
(08:34):
taught people and also accepted official posts for free, so
he dealt all this without pay, and then he would
donate the proceeds from 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
(08:54):
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 the ladies. 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
(09:18):
could have been added the name of stendhow lists, love affairs, lists,
children lists, perilous escape 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. He was
(09:39):
also extremely attractive. Like I'm having trouble picking out which
extremely attractive picture of franz 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. He was very sensitive
(10:00):
and soulful and wrote terrible poetry and made all of
the girls think that he was just so tragically attractive
like that, that's 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 I'm kidding. He is
(10:24):
a pretty thing. I mean, he's very beautiful. So basically
this all meant that Bronze List was a nineteenth century
virtuo so piano rock star. And that's where this mania
comes in. We're going to talk about after a brief
word from a sponsor. So to understand this mania that
(10:56):
erupted around Fronze List, let's start by talking about what
he is like in concert. Here's any scription written by
Hans Christian Anderson of all people. As Lists 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
(11:17):
to the instrument. Whence his tones streamed forth. They came
from his blood, from his thoughts. 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 assumed a nobler and brighter expression.
(11:40):
The divine soul shone from his eyes. From every feature,
he became as beauteous as 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 age to himself, But Liz did basically invent
(12:03):
this sort of recital as a performance format, and it
definitely wasn't common for someone 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,
List played with the piano in profile so that people
could see his face while he played, and he would
(12:26):
whip his kind of longish hair around 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 yourself. On
(12:47):
decembert one, Franz Liszt played the first 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
(13:10):
brooches that had his face on them, 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 From's 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 then carry it
(13:34):
around with them in that vial. 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
cigar butts encased in a locket that had his initials
and jewels on the front. I love it. I mean
that makes perfect sense to me. Do you remember that
(13:55):
Angelina Jolie and Billy Bob Thornton were walking around with
vials 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 the audience
(14:19):
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 last weirds of
(14:40):
all of them. 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 did
(15:03):
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 dominy
on April four, at which point Liz had actually moved
on to Paris. And at first Hina actually thought this
(15:23):
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 Franzist came to Paris, where
people were a lot freer, there was a lot more
(15:45):
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. These Parisians who have seen Napoleon, who
had to win one battle after another to hold their attention,
(16:07):
now they are claiming our franz List, and what in
acclaim 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 asked to
(16:30):
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 historical epilepsy,
(16:52):
of the phenomenon of tickling of musical canthriads, and other
scabbarous things which I believe you 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 times
(17:13):
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 franz 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 syndrome
(17:37):
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. No, all
(17:57):
the way back to franz List, maybe 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
(18:19):
like Chopin and Schumann and Mendelssohn. A lot of people
in the musical world really started to dislike frands 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
(18:42):
throwing gloves and handkerchiefs into the audience, but he really
still didn't seem to quite fathom the extent of everybody's intensity.
But just like Beatlemania, Spice Girlmania and beaber Fever, it
eventually subsided. We're gonna talk about that some more after
we have a quick word from one of our fabulous sponsors.
(19:11):
So to get to the end of list Domania and
the end of brons lists life. 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
(19:33):
teaching and composing instead, and so while he and the
previous his previous love interest, the Contests 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
(19:55):
of thirty seven, he accepted the permanent post of Kapameister,
basically the person in charge of music 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.
(20:16):
In addition to his ongoing teaching and composition, Lists started
trying to create new musical forms, the most famous of
these with the symphonic poem, which is a musical piecet
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.
(20:37):
He dedicated most of his music around this time to
the Princess Caroline, and while in Weimar, Liszt wrote what's
considered to be his most accomplished symphonic work in Faus
Symphony or Faus Symphony. This is essentially a series of
interconnected symphonic poems based on Johann Wolfgang van Getta's tragic
play Faust. Geta and Schiller had both lived in wim Are,
(21:00):
and Liz drew musical inspiration from their literary work. His
post as Capitalmeister also 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
(21:21):
another and that nobody missed their cues. But list added
gestures and expressions and in emotive physical presence to guide
what the orchestra should 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,
(21:41):
life became more difficult for Liz. He resigned his post
and VIMR in eighteen fifty nine, and at that point
two of his children also died, one in that same
year that he resigned, 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
(22:02):
Richard Wagner against the more conservative, classically inclined traditionalist faction
of Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelsohn, 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 Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. This association with Wagner also
(22:26):
meant that Liz developed a reputation for having anti Semitic views,
but their significant dispute 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
(22:52):
as this whole musical schism was going on, Lists 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
(23:13):
monastery outside of Rome, and two 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
(23:35):
become an abbot and he produced a number of religiously
themed musical works. In eighteen seventy, List returned 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
(23:55):
Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest, and today
this is the Unlist Academy of Music. For the last
fifteen years of his life, 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
(24:17):
education today. He taught these demonstration based classes, he being
the master, of course, for free. He struggled with depression
and failing health towards the end of his life, and
he died in Germany on July thirty one, eight six.
By then, he had composed about fourteen hundred works. Although
(24:38):
he's pretty universally recognized as a virtuos piano player as
well as for his contributions to the art of conducting
and the idea of symphonic poems, there are still people
that argue that his skill as a composer was all hype. Yeah.
I found several articles that were like, fri List, was
he really any good? I don't think so. That's always
(24:59):
the case with avant garde folks though, right well, and
it's also the case with excessively pretty soulful looking people
who acquire an overly excited base of fans that like
to scream a lot, right, I mean you could say
that of any person in the arts or anything really weird,
(25:20):
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 if they are super talented and amazing, Right,
people say that about the Beatles, and there it's like,
there are plenty of arguments you can make about the
Beatles 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
(25:42):
dismiss the entirety of the Beatles because ladies were screaming
about them. Yeah, so they're also this whole phenomenon spawned
a weird rock opera about problem List in the nineteen
seventies that was called list Romania. And there's also a
song and album by the band Nix that became very
popular more much more recently. Um, if you want to
(26:04):
read all kinds of primary sources about Bronze List, the
Library of Congress has a whole bunch of them, a
bunch of them are on the web. Pretty aw cool.
Thank you so much for joining us on this Saturday.
If you have heard an email address or a Facebook
(26:25):
you are l or something similar over the course of
today's episode, since it is from the archive that might
be out of date. Now, you can email us at
history podcast at how stuff Works dot com, and you
can find us all over social media at missed in History.
And you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts,
Google podcast, the I Heart Radio app, and wherever else
(26:45):
you listen to podcasts. For more on this and thousands
of other topics, is it how stuff Works dot com.
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