Franz Liszt: Musician, Celebrity, Superstar. By Oliver Hilmes. Translated by Stewart Spencer. Yale University Press; 353 pages; $38 and £25.

AN INFECTIOUS disease swept through musical Europe in the mid-19th century. It was christened “Lisztomania” by Heinrich Heine, a German poet. Women were its main victims, with fetishism and erotic fantasies the presenting symptoms; the lady who devoutly poured the dregs from Franz Liszt’s tea cup into her scent-bottle was one case. Moreover, clad in black and tossing his shoulder-length locks as he swayed histrionically over the keyboard, Liszt too was addicted to playing his part in this communal rapture.

Oliver Hilmes oddly suggests at the end of his book that the “real Liszt” may never have existed, and that his personality consisted of “irreconcilable opposites”. But lifelong narcissism combined with a deep sense of artistic purpose would seem to furnish a perfectly adequate explanation for his switchback career. At 16, while earning fabulous sums as a recitalist, he later wrote that he felt sick of being “a performing dog” and yearned to join the priesthood; at 20 he gaily dived into salons in Paris while immersing himself in proto-Marxist philosophy; when he was 35 and at the height of his fame, he suddenly abandoned his virtuoso career to devote himself to conducting, teaching and playing in concerts for charity; at 54 he took orders to become an abbé, but that in no way inhibited his brilliantly successful talent for self-publicity, or for bewitching the female pupils who continued to pursue him almost to the end of his days. Charismatic Olga Janina, like Liszt a cigar-smoker, laid siege to him armed with a revolver (to dispatch him, if he didn’t yield) and bottles of poison (to dispatch herself).

If this book has a once-over-lightly feel, that is because there were many intertwined strands in Liszt’s extraordinary life, each of which could merit a book in itself. As a musical biography, Mr Hilmes’s account is superficial compared with Alan Walker’s three-volume “Franz Liszt”, which authoritatively analyses Liszt’s achievements as composer, conductor and polemicist, and demonstrates his pivotal importance in the development of European music.

But Mr Hilmes is illuminating on the emergence—and continuance into old age—of Liszt’s preternatural gifts as a pianist. And by drawing on hitherto unpublished documentary sources he provides a riveting chronicle of the composer’s tangled relationships. He spent 11 sexually tempestuous years with the Countess Marie d’Agoult, followed by 39 tormentedly religious ones with the intellectually formidable (and immensely rich) Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein; his flings on the side tended to be quite serious too.

But the real tragedy lay in Liszt’s relationship with his daughter Cosima. She waited half her life to punish the father who had deserted her mother and then placed his daughters under a pathologically cruel governess. As wife of the egotistic Richard Wagner, whose music Liszt loyally championed for 40 years, Cosima contemptuously reduced her father to the status of a lackey in the Wagner establishment, denying him all affection in his helpless dying days.