Liszt is wonderful and unique, but you would not know it from the hapless subtitle to this study by Oliver Hilmes. A biography of a major cultural figure should not start by sounding like a performing arts undergraduate describing themself on Twitter. And without meaning any disrespect, this must be regarded as an unnecessary book. The weight of biographical commentary on Liszt is simply colossal. People have been writing full-length accounts of him since he was in his early 20s, and touring 1830s Europe. The first biographies written with the declared aim of stripping away accumulated myths appeared within Liszt’s lifetime, and have gone on being published ever since. Besides, in very recent times, he has been the subject of a truly great biography, Alan Walker’s astonishing and gloriously entertaining three-volume study, still in print. Oliver Hilmes wrote a very good life of Liszt’s appalling daughter, Cosima Wagner; I must say that I think his abilities would have been better directed elsewhere.

Liszt was not the first touring virtuoso, but he was certainly someone who attracted vast interest due to his good looks, showy abilities and constant powers of reinvention. There is really no modern-day equivalent, though we pretend otherwise, and suggest that someone working in 4/4 in E minor is doing something never attempted before. If you could imagine a combination of Lang Lang’s virtuosity, Justin Timberlake’s mass appeal and Per Nørgård’s sheer confrontational newness, then something of Liszt could be envisaged. But it is impossible: circumstances have changed too much.

The outlines of the story are impressive enough. His father touted him round Europe as a child, when he made considerable impact as a virtuoso and a composer. At 11, he contributed a variation to a project of the publisher Diabelli, the one that casually spawned a masterpiece by Beethoven. His father died early, and Liszt, at 15, took himself in hand. By the time he was 20, he was making a name for himself in Paris. He moved comfortably between the established aristocratic salons and more public performances. The scale and unprecedented force of his playing demanded stronger technology from piano makers – his recitals often required two pianos, as the first was likely to be destroyed in performance. We can only guess at the effects of his playing, but the piano music he was writing in the 1830s and 1840s gives a sense of his boldness. The sonorities are extraordinary, and the demands on the player still terrifying today (even Liszt had to retreat somewhat from some of the challenges he mounted in the 1840s). There is, too, the fascination of his effect on his society: he was charismatic and beautiful, and the list of his mistresses is long.

There is a compelling mixture of the visionary genius and the utter charlatan in Liszt. Some of his most interesting pieces are also the most vulgar, such as the brilliant fantasies on operatic themes from Norma, Rigoletto and (for some, unforgivably) Don Giovanni. But there is a strange paradox here: the transcendental climaxes he so specialised in as a composer remain gloriously stagey, an apt accompaniment to John Martin’s apocalyptic paintings. Nothing in Liszt matches the mystical inwardness of Chopin’s Polonaise-Fantaisie; his masterpieces are weirdly sincere and transparent in their calculations.

Those masterpieces came thick and fast in the strangest period of Liszt’s career, his acceptance of the archaic post of kapellmeister at the tiny court of Weimar. He no doubt took the post because of the historical associations with culture at its most idealistic. What he found was a tiny court with few resources, a town of crippling conventionality and an immediate hostility to himself and his type. The apparent justification for Hilmes’s biography is the examination of some Weimar state papers, which, in fact, merely confirm what previous biographers had surmised about official attitudes to the composer and his menage. The pay was derisory (Liszt referred to it, without the slightest exaggeration, as paying for his cigars); the requirement to dress up in archaic dress was humiliating. But somehow Weimar represents Liszt at his greatest.

There are two aspects of his personality that make him immensely sympathetic. He had very little jealousy towards other major creative figures, though Chopin, Schumann, Brahms and even Wagner did not always respond to him so generously. He supported the development not only of these major figures, but of fascinating minor ones such as Joachim Raff and Peter Cornelius, and any number of great pianists. Second, he very much liked intelligent women – an entranced George Eliot gives a vivid account of him – and in the Weimar era, set up with one of the most interesting minds of the period, Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. Most biographers like Sayn-Wittgenstein much less than Liszt did, and many, until recently, rushed to mock the fact that she wrote an enormous historical account of the Roman Catholic church. Hilmes acknowledges her cleverness and her bad luck, but, alas, rushes to express his incredulity that a man such as Liszt should settle for a first-rate mind when it isn’t attached to feminine pulchritude.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest George Eliot was quite taken by Liszt. Illustration: Alamy

During the Weimar period, Liszt transformed music. The 12 remarkable symphonic poems showed how malleable musical form could be, dissolving rather than firmly concluding; modernity was born in Liszt’s most daring harmonic developments and in his ongoing experiments with sonority and performing technique. Much of his creative work, after the virtuoso period, is fascinating rather than fully achieved, but the great work of others, from Tristan und Isolde to Brahms’s Paganini Variations is hardly conceivable without him. In old age, his creative work thinned out further into cryptic miniatures, some easy enough for a child to play; in bagatelles such as Nuages Gris, the Bagatelle Without Tonality and La Lugubre Gondola the revolutions Schoenberg would work out, 30 years in the future, have already taken place.

This is very much a biography directed towards people interested in Liszt’s life, and not what matters, his music. There are no music examples, and quite why the B Minor Sonata, for instance, is an “important piece”, “masterly” and yet, according to Clara Schumann, without any “wholesome thought” must be guessed at by the reader. Some of the translator’s work seems off the mark – I don’t think Sayn‑Wittgenstein, on her first appearance, can be described as “this portentous princess” – but other curious misapprehensions must be Hilmes’s own. He says that Liszt’s unusually large hands “enabled him to perform wide leaps”; the size of someone’s hands might enable the player to render a widespread chord, but could hardly have any effect on the capacity to perform leaps. There are plenty of things in Liszt that sound impressive but aren’t actually very difficult (I don’t think the Sonata becomes truly terrifying until the octave passages very near the end). What is required of the biographer is the understanding of exactly what Liszt was conquering, and an ability to separate legerdemain, flirtatious charlatanry and even noisy footling from the awesome substance. For this, I recommend Walker’s book, a triumph of understanding and complex sympathy.

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