Piano Symbolism: Franz Liszt and the Aesthetic (Remnants) of Composition
Franz Liszt was acknowledged in his day as a pianist endowed with a prodigious command of the keyboard. His masterful abilities dramatically augmented the level of difficulty associated with the piano repertoire during his lifetime, and his cultivation of public appeal currently translates into a specific conceptual niche within the canon – namely, that of the virtuoso performer. Descriptions of Liszt as an artist known for his showmanship and technical excellence, the likes of which had not been seen in a pianist prior to his day, are striking in the face of a repertoire that confronts the limits of human capability. I would like to expand the construction of Liszt’s material relationship to his piano by analyzing contemporary imagery portraying the pianist in different stages of celebrity, and culminating with an investigation of the object that enabled his visual reputation, his own 1862 Érard & Co. grand piano. When situated in the world of the visual, Liszt’s Romanticism takes on a new dimension, access to which musicological discourse alone does not permit.
No longer merely the talented artisan or the employed apprentice of the Classical era and the Enlightenment, Liszt was part of an evolving cult of artists touched by a truer insight into the human condition. He is heir to a wealth of ideology making a hero of the individual, and is the intellectual descendent of Goethe’s wanderings and Rousseau’s joie de vivre. Because of his very public histrionics, his love of attention, and his frank and deliberate subversion of genial grooming, Liszt is a fitting prototype of how the greater gifts of creativity can be translated into representation, and thus makes a convenient, if not engaging, model for an iconographical study. An inspection of contemporary imagery depicting Liszt shall reveal that he borrowed from the Romantic ideal in order to manufacture a personality that appealed to the tastes of his time, and acquired in the process the affects that would later translate into caricature.
Paris, the city that would serve as the backdrop to what would be the most substantive portion of Liszt’s performing career, was enjoying a newfound interest in musical performances at the time of Liszt’s residency. At this juncture, observes Richard Leppert, music, in all of its manifestations, came to be “the sonorous sign of individual life, and inner life was the sign of the bourgeois subject, the much heralded, newly invented, and highly idealized ‘individual”’. Concert audiences grew more substantial as the middle class increased, and Liszt enjoyed the interest paid to him by the Parisian public ready to personally embrace the acting-out of the performer fantasy. As a pianist and performer, Liszt’s charisma was manifest in his fiery, and notoriously dramatic, madness. Consider Heinrich Heine:
When 'Liszt' sits at the piano and has brushed his hair back over his brow several times, and begins to improvise, then he often rages all too madly over the ivory keys and there sounds a wilderness of heaven-storming ideas, between which here and there the sweetest flowers spread their fragrance, so that one feels at once anxious and blessed, but yet still more anxious.
These now infamous gesticulations, those by which Heine is at once repulsed and intrigued, swiftly gained Liszt the reputation of a showman who began to attract the attention of the numerous painters and photographers for whom he would later sit. The contemporaneous writer Fanny Lewald, remarked, “So noble was his head that during the years from 1830 to 1840, when he was living mainly in Paris, he had as much influence upon visual artists as did the classical beauty of the Comtesse d’Agoult.” When combined with his recognizable physical features – his hooked nose appealed to the pen of caricaturists, the coif of hair pushed aside his forehead was the inspiration for many a photographer – this profusion of gesture made for an easily distinguishable character whose bodily attributes became synonymous with his personality. Hence the abundance of caricatures that survive, and that still appear identifiable to us, the twenty-first-century viewer. Göschl’s late 19th-century images 'fig. 1' codify the histrionic personality that was emerging from the piano bench in the way that only the visual can: expression predominates and form is reduced to surrealist exaggeration. In the caricatures, Liszt’s physical engagement with the keyboard becomes material substance to be consumed, and this brands his image and packages it for preservation.
One of the earliest photographs of Liszt known to exist is one taken in 1856 by Franz Hanfstaengl, in Munich 'fig. 2'. Liszt is rendered a model: he is seated with his left arm in his lap and his right hand clasped to the railing of a chair, clad to his neck in darkened weaves, save for a lighter wash of shirt which emerges from behind the shadows of a cravat and a mass of stringy, unwashed hair. Attempts to situate the musician in space are problematic, even though he exists solidly within the picture plane. The photograph lacks furniture and discloses only a curtained backdrop and portions of a chair at eye level. This emphasizes Liszt’s commanding presence, large stature and complete domination of the frame.
The tendency in much early photography to scientifically represent the figure alone as a means of extolling the virtues of a new medium came to define a break from these canonic conventions. Interestingly, the influence is seen in painting of the time—a typical example for our purposes is Marcel Baschet’s 1884 portrait of Claude Debussy 'fig. 3'. The harmony of Baschet’s feathered brushstrokes is echoed in the chromatic effervescence of the composer’s Impressionism, and at once the portrait is personalized and modern. Hanfstaengl’s photograph of Liszt is imbued with this very rhetorical language; although Liszt is captured at a moment in which he is temporarily detached from the musical text, he is connected, nonetheless, to a growing visual narrative that by now existed in counterpoint to his musical reputation.
Only seldom is Liszt photographed at the piano. Pictures portraying him holding music do exist, but such poses are rare in comparison to the single-figure compositions that predominate, especially toward the end of his lifetime. In a photograph such as Hanfstaengl’s, any visual clues linking Liszt to the world of the musician are absent. Without exterior stimuli, the sitter’s fundamental attribute must inevitably become the visual rhetoric conveyed through gesture – his eyes, expression and glance reveal the presence of mind, a countenance and character. Liszt’s gesticulations were so engrained in the public eye that the tools of his trade, in an image, become verbose, decadent and repetitive if rendered at his side. Instead, Liszt’s aloneness results in corpus embodying opus, as the complexities of the individual are now rendered subject.
Painting is less candid, for the medium grants the artist an amount of control over the symbolic content of his composition. Josef Danhauser portrays Liszt at his piano in a room filled with people in his 1840 painting, Liszt at the Piano 'fig. 4' (now in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin).
By donning a sense of chaos to the nature of the music strewn about the chamber, Danhauser is hinting at Liszt’s disorderly appropriation of gesture and facial rhetoric as a means of image enhancement. The mess of sheet music, existing as excessively upon the piano as the gestures do beside it, becomes an attribute: it provides insight into the habits of the artist too consumed with his art to notice his own disorder. Liszt’s implied subscription to the personified elements of composition enables the disorder itself to be read as a branding of legitimacy. Similarly we witness another convention at work: that of the tendency in visual representation for disheveled insanity to be associated with the creative individual or genius. Here we uncover Liszt’s link to the Romantic Hero genealogy. Surely Beethoven – whose lifestyle and neuroses, associated with overcoming the difficulties of creation, grant him the attribution of “insane genius” – has handed down more than mere musical traits to his descendent.
By considering a reproduction of Liszt beside the tool of his trade, we are able to elaborate upon implications involving his composing that exist alongside a milieu fraught with social concerns. However, what if we were to read Liszt’s grand piano, made by Érard in Paris circa 1862, as a means for this transference of inspiration into creative energy, and as a vehicle for Liszt’s inheritance (musical and otherwise) from the past? When juxtaposed with its owner the instrument is objectified in its basic opposition with its subject, and as such becomes the indisputable symbol of the hero’s passage.
This instrument in particular provides a unique insight into the physical manifestations of Liszt’s habits. Curators of the Musical Instruments Department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where the instrument is currently on loan, believe that the Érard probably belonged to Liszt in the final years of his life. Carlo Maria Dominici, an Italian who first stumbled upon the instrument in 1991, cites the discovery of missing beads which had been lost in the mechanism of the piano when Liszt, according to a surviving letter, accidentally broke a rosary while composing. Cognac stains are also evident – one might say in moral counterpoint – upon the keys. So convincing was Dominici’s colorful claim for the instrument’s genealogy that five years later The Liszt Society would issue its authentication of the attribution, stressing the fact that the beads matched those in one of Liszt’s rosaries at the Liszt Museum in Budapest.
If the Érard is, indeed, the piano Liszt used in his apartment in the Villa d’Este, in Tivoli, then it is the instrument he used the most throughout his career. And so it bears the remains of the artist’s craft, while setting into relief its owner’s volatile personality caught within the contrasts of sin and retribution, toil and performance. These extra-organological details imbue the instrument with the ideological weight of an artifact: the musician’s conquered hardships at once become tangible, for the blood of the hero, the sinful excess of the divinely-inspired, literally stain the tool. Liszt’s overabundance of attributes, should such provenance hold credence, are preserved here post-mortem, the museum gallery a reliquary for features caught on display.
The association that madness has come to have with creativity is not, in itself, a strictly Romantic invention, despite its appropriation by theorists into nineteenth-century ideology. Liszt’s embodiment of the Romantic Hero ideal is also inextricably linked to a lineage in the canonic discourse. The heroic plight of the individual can be traced back to Rousseau’s Confessions, in which the writer composes his memoirs after a journey of self-discovery; and eventually back to Aristotle, whose Poetics issue a humanistic sentiment eagerly propagated by Renaissance thinkers. More recently, Foucault would contribute to this by implying, through his studies of the more subversive ranks of society (namely the ill, the depraved, and eventually, the insane), that the mind of the creative individual was predisposed to derangement. As a means of elaborating upon his leitmotiv that madness is inherent in all corners of the human imagination, Foucault claims that 'quoting Saint-Évremond':
We owe the invention of the arts to deranged imaginations; the Caprice of Painters, Poets, and Musicians is only a name moderated in civility to express their Madness.
In a photograph devoted to the celebration of the individual, Liszt is on all accounts able to personify the maddening struggles of the artist without relying upon cognac, indeed without needing a piano, to encourage his creativity. Alone we might deem him a Romantic hero who has single-handedly conquered the difficulties of his art, and who has survived virtuous. When the object is added to the mixture of imagery, a more complex construction of an artist tied to the bourgeoning spirit of Romanticism arises. The Danhauser canvas makes a symbol of the madness—the disorderly transfer of genius becomes an attribute – it simultaneously records and constructs the ideology of the virtuoso. When he is performing at the piano, Liszt is heroicized by an audience ready to make a celebrity of the virtuoso. The instrument alone, however, because it bears the symbolic remains of this transference, complicates our understanding of Liszt’s personality as one of Adornian “fetishized” celebrity, mad with material, visual excesses. Consequently, once the piano is extricated from its subject-object context and observed in a museum showcase it becomes a symbol: it inherits the iconographic prerequisites of a work of art, and embodies the attributes of its owner via visual associations imparted by its viewers. Thus Liszt’s Érard is at once a catalyst and repository of the Romantic notion of the individual, one that the mere rendering of his figure, alone, in a photograph cannot convey. Examining the piano allows the voyeur – the scholar, the curious museum-goer – access to Liszt in the most personal of ways. With its capacity to transfer the metaphorical into the tangible, the instrument engages us physically with this dialogue and captures Liszt in an ideological snapshot, one from which he can neither escape nor control.
+ + +
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor, ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London & New York: 1991).
Burger, Ernst Franz Liszt: A Chronicle of his Life in Pictures and Documents, trans. Stewart Spencer (Princeton: 1989).
Clements, Andrew, ‘Classical Reviews: Portrait of the Artist’, The Guardian, 9 December, 2005.
Foucault, Michel, ‘Stultifera Navis’, in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: 1965).
Göschl, A., 'caricatures of Liszt', Borsszem Jankó, 6 April 1873, p. 5.
Howard, Leslie, President of the Liszt Society, London, in a letter dated 23 February, 1996.
Kramer, Lawrence, ‘Franz Liszt and the Virtuoso Public Sphere: Sight and Sound in the Rise of Mass Entertainment’, in Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley & London, 2002).
Leppert, Richard, ‘Cultural Contradiction, Idolatry and the Piano Virtuoso: Franz Liszt’, in Piano Roles: Three Centuries of Life with the Piano, ed. James Parakilos (Yale: 1999).
——————, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body, (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: 1993).
Moore, Ken, Curator, Department of Musical Instruments, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gallery Tour, June 2001.
Mueller, Rena Charnin, et. al., Programme notes, ‘Franz Liszt Festival: Celebrating the discovery of Franz Liszt’s Villa d’Este Piano’, The Riverside Church in the City of New York and St. Paul’s Chapel of Columbia University, September 25–30, 2001.
Saint-Évremond, Sir Politik would be. act V, scene ii, quoted in Foucault, op. cit.
Pollens, Stewart, Conservator, Department of Musical Instruments, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Conversation with the author, January 2006.
Walker, Alan, Franz Liszt, Volume One: The Virtuoso Years, 1811—1847 (London & Boston: 1983).
FIGURES
'fig. 1' A. Göschl, 'caricatures of Liszt', Borsszem Jankó, 6 April 1873, p. 5.
'fig. 2' Franz Hanfstaengl, Franz Liszt, Munich, November 1856.
'fig. 3' Marcel Baschet, Claude Debussy, 1884 (Versailles Museum).
'fig. 4' Josef Danhauser, Franz Liszt at the Piano, 1840, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.
Franz Liszt was acknowledged in his day as a pianist endowed with a prodigious command of the keyboard. His masterful abilities dramatically augmented the level of difficulty associated with the piano repertoire during his lifetime, and his cultivation of public appeal currently translates into a specific conceptual niche within the canon – namely, that of the virtuoso performer. Descriptions of Liszt as an artist known for his showmanship and technical excellence, the likes of which had not been seen in a pianist prior to his day, are striking in the face of a repertoire that confronts the limits of human capability. I would like to expand the construction of Liszt’s material relationship to his piano by analyzing contemporary imagery portraying the pianist in different stages of celebrity, and culminating with an investigation of the object that enabled his visual reputation, his own 1862 Érard & Co. grand piano. When situated in the world of the visual, Liszt’s Romanticism takes on a new dimension, access to which musicological discourse alone does not permit.
No longer merely the talented artisan or the employed apprentice of the Classical era and the Enlightenment, Liszt was part of an evolving cult of artists touched by a truer insight into the human condition. He is heir to a wealth of ideology making a hero of the individual, and is the intellectual descendent of Goethe’s wanderings and Rousseau’s joie de vivre. Because of his very public histrionics, his love of attention, and his frank and deliberate subversion of genial grooming, Liszt is a fitting prototype of how the greater gifts of creativity can be translated into representation, and thus makes a convenient, if not engaging, model for an iconographical study. An inspection of contemporary imagery depicting Liszt shall reveal that he borrowed from the Romantic ideal in order to manufacture a personality that appealed to the tastes of his time, and acquired in the process the affects that would later translate into caricature.
Paris, the city that would serve as the backdrop to what would be the most substantive portion of Liszt’s performing career, was enjoying a newfound interest in musical performances at the time of Liszt’s residency. At this juncture, observes Richard Leppert, music, in all of its manifestations, came to be “the sonorous sign of individual life, and inner life was the sign of the bourgeois subject, the much heralded, newly invented, and highly idealized ‘individual”’. Concert audiences grew more substantial as the middle class increased, and Liszt enjoyed the interest paid to him by the Parisian public ready to personally embrace the acting-out of the performer fantasy. As a pianist and performer, Liszt’s charisma was manifest in his fiery, and notoriously dramatic, madness. Consider Heinrich Heine:
When 'Liszt' sits at the piano and has brushed his hair back over his brow several times, and begins to improvise, then he often rages all too madly over the ivory keys and there sounds a wilderness of heaven-storming ideas, between which here and there the sweetest flowers spread their fragrance, so that one feels at once anxious and blessed, but yet still more anxious.
These now infamous gesticulations, those by which Heine is at once repulsed and intrigued, swiftly gained Liszt the reputation of a showman who began to attract the attention of the numerous painters and photographers for whom he would later sit. The contemporaneous writer Fanny Lewald, remarked, “So noble was his head that during the years from 1830 to 1840, when he was living mainly in Paris, he had as much influence upon visual artists as did the classical beauty of the Comtesse d’Agoult.” When combined with his recognizable physical features – his hooked nose appealed to the pen of caricaturists, the coif of hair pushed aside his forehead was the inspiration for many a photographer – this profusion of gesture made for an easily distinguishable character whose bodily attributes became synonymous with his personality. Hence the abundance of caricatures that survive, and that still appear identifiable to us, the twenty-first-century viewer. Göschl’s late 19th-century images 'fig. 1' codify the histrionic personality that was emerging from the piano bench in the way that only the visual can: expression predominates and form is reduced to surrealist exaggeration. In the caricatures, Liszt’s physical engagement with the keyboard becomes material substance to be consumed, and this brands his image and packages it for preservation.
fig. 1
One of the earliest photographs of Liszt known to exist is one taken in 1856 by Franz Hanfstaengl, in Munich 'fig. 2'. Liszt is rendered a model: he is seated with his left arm in his lap and his right hand clasped to the railing of a chair, clad to his neck in darkened weaves, save for a lighter wash of shirt which emerges from behind the shadows of a cravat and a mass of stringy, unwashed hair. Attempts to situate the musician in space are problematic, even though he exists solidly within the picture plane. The photograph lacks furniture and discloses only a curtained backdrop and portions of a chair at eye level. This emphasizes Liszt’s commanding presence, large stature and complete domination of the frame.
fig. 2
The tendency in much early photography to scientifically represent the figure alone as a means of extolling the virtues of a new medium came to define a break from these canonic conventions. Interestingly, the influence is seen in painting of the time—a typical example for our purposes is Marcel Baschet’s 1884 portrait of Claude Debussy 'fig. 3'. The harmony of Baschet’s feathered brushstrokes is echoed in the chromatic effervescence of the composer’s Impressionism, and at once the portrait is personalized and modern. Hanfstaengl’s photograph of Liszt is imbued with this very rhetorical language; although Liszt is captured at a moment in which he is temporarily detached from the musical text, he is connected, nonetheless, to a growing visual narrative that by now existed in counterpoint to his musical reputation.
fig. 3
Only seldom is Liszt photographed at the piano. Pictures portraying him holding music do exist, but such poses are rare in comparison to the single-figure compositions that predominate, especially toward the end of his lifetime. In a photograph such as Hanfstaengl’s, any visual clues linking Liszt to the world of the musician are absent. Without exterior stimuli, the sitter’s fundamental attribute must inevitably become the visual rhetoric conveyed through gesture – his eyes, expression and glance reveal the presence of mind, a countenance and character. Liszt’s gesticulations were so engrained in the public eye that the tools of his trade, in an image, become verbose, decadent and repetitive if rendered at his side. Instead, Liszt’s aloneness results in corpus embodying opus, as the complexities of the individual are now rendered subject.
Painting is less candid, for the medium grants the artist an amount of control over the symbolic content of his composition. Josef Danhauser portrays Liszt at his piano in a room filled with people in his 1840 painting, Liszt at the Piano 'fig. 4' (now in the Staatliche Museen, Berlin).
fig. 4
By donning a sense of chaos to the nature of the music strewn about the chamber, Danhauser is hinting at Liszt’s disorderly appropriation of gesture and facial rhetoric as a means of image enhancement. The mess of sheet music, existing as excessively upon the piano as the gestures do beside it, becomes an attribute: it provides insight into the habits of the artist too consumed with his art to notice his own disorder. Liszt’s implied subscription to the personified elements of composition enables the disorder itself to be read as a branding of legitimacy. Similarly we witness another convention at work: that of the tendency in visual representation for disheveled insanity to be associated with the creative individual or genius. Here we uncover Liszt’s link to the Romantic Hero genealogy. Surely Beethoven – whose lifestyle and neuroses, associated with overcoming the difficulties of creation, grant him the attribution of “insane genius” – has handed down more than mere musical traits to his descendent.
By considering a reproduction of Liszt beside the tool of his trade, we are able to elaborate upon implications involving his composing that exist alongside a milieu fraught with social concerns. However, what if we were to read Liszt’s grand piano, made by Érard in Paris circa 1862, as a means for this transference of inspiration into creative energy, and as a vehicle for Liszt’s inheritance (musical and otherwise) from the past? When juxtaposed with its owner the instrument is objectified in its basic opposition with its subject, and as such becomes the indisputable symbol of the hero’s passage.
This instrument in particular provides a unique insight into the physical manifestations of Liszt’s habits. Curators of the Musical Instruments Department at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where the instrument is currently on loan, believe that the Érard probably belonged to Liszt in the final years of his life. Carlo Maria Dominici, an Italian who first stumbled upon the instrument in 1991, cites the discovery of missing beads which had been lost in the mechanism of the piano when Liszt, according to a surviving letter, accidentally broke a rosary while composing. Cognac stains are also evident – one might say in moral counterpoint – upon the keys. So convincing was Dominici’s colorful claim for the instrument’s genealogy that five years later The Liszt Society would issue its authentication of the attribution, stressing the fact that the beads matched those in one of Liszt’s rosaries at the Liszt Museum in Budapest.
If the Érard is, indeed, the piano Liszt used in his apartment in the Villa d’Este, in Tivoli, then it is the instrument he used the most throughout his career. And so it bears the remains of the artist’s craft, while setting into relief its owner’s volatile personality caught within the contrasts of sin and retribution, toil and performance. These extra-organological details imbue the instrument with the ideological weight of an artifact: the musician’s conquered hardships at once become tangible, for the blood of the hero, the sinful excess of the divinely-inspired, literally stain the tool. Liszt’s overabundance of attributes, should such provenance hold credence, are preserved here post-mortem, the museum gallery a reliquary for features caught on display.
The association that madness has come to have with creativity is not, in itself, a strictly Romantic invention, despite its appropriation by theorists into nineteenth-century ideology. Liszt’s embodiment of the Romantic Hero ideal is also inextricably linked to a lineage in the canonic discourse. The heroic plight of the individual can be traced back to Rousseau’s Confessions, in which the writer composes his memoirs after a journey of self-discovery; and eventually back to Aristotle, whose Poetics issue a humanistic sentiment eagerly propagated by Renaissance thinkers. More recently, Foucault would contribute to this by implying, through his studies of the more subversive ranks of society (namely the ill, the depraved, and eventually, the insane), that the mind of the creative individual was predisposed to derangement. As a means of elaborating upon his leitmotiv that madness is inherent in all corners of the human imagination, Foucault claims that 'quoting Saint-Évremond':
We owe the invention of the arts to deranged imaginations; the Caprice of Painters, Poets, and Musicians is only a name moderated in civility to express their Madness.
In a photograph devoted to the celebration of the individual, Liszt is on all accounts able to personify the maddening struggles of the artist without relying upon cognac, indeed without needing a piano, to encourage his creativity. Alone we might deem him a Romantic hero who has single-handedly conquered the difficulties of his art, and who has survived virtuous. When the object is added to the mixture of imagery, a more complex construction of an artist tied to the bourgeoning spirit of Romanticism arises. The Danhauser canvas makes a symbol of the madness—the disorderly transfer of genius becomes an attribute – it simultaneously records and constructs the ideology of the virtuoso. When he is performing at the piano, Liszt is heroicized by an audience ready to make a celebrity of the virtuoso. The instrument alone, however, because it bears the symbolic remains of this transference, complicates our understanding of Liszt’s personality as one of Adornian “fetishized” celebrity, mad with material, visual excesses. Consequently, once the piano is extricated from its subject-object context and observed in a museum showcase it becomes a symbol: it inherits the iconographic prerequisites of a work of art, and embodies the attributes of its owner via visual associations imparted by its viewers. Thus Liszt’s Érard is at once a catalyst and repository of the Romantic notion of the individual, one that the mere rendering of his figure, alone, in a photograph cannot convey. Examining the piano allows the voyeur – the scholar, the curious museum-goer – access to Liszt in the most personal of ways. With its capacity to transfer the metaphorical into the tangible, the instrument engages us physically with this dialogue and captures Liszt in an ideological snapshot, one from which he can neither escape nor control.
+ + +
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, Theodor, ‘On the Fetish Character in Music and the Regression of Listening’, in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M. Bernstein (London & New York: 1991).
Burger, Ernst Franz Liszt: A Chronicle of his Life in Pictures and Documents, trans. Stewart Spencer (Princeton: 1989).
Clements, Andrew, ‘Classical Reviews: Portrait of the Artist’, The Guardian, 9 December, 2005.
Foucault, Michel, ‘Stultifera Navis’, in Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans. Richard Howard (New York: 1965).
Göschl, A., 'caricatures of Liszt', Borsszem Jankó, 6 April 1873, p. 5.
Howard, Leslie, President of the Liszt Society, London, in a letter dated 23 February, 1996.
Kramer, Lawrence, ‘Franz Liszt and the Virtuoso Public Sphere: Sight and Sound in the Rise of Mass Entertainment’, in Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley & London, 2002).
Leppert, Richard, ‘Cultural Contradiction, Idolatry and the Piano Virtuoso: Franz Liszt’, in Piano Roles: Three Centuries of Life with the Piano, ed. James Parakilos (Yale: 1999).
——————, The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body, (Berkeley, Los Angeles & London: 1993).
Moore, Ken, Curator, Department of Musical Instruments, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gallery Tour, June 2001.
Mueller, Rena Charnin, et. al., Programme notes, ‘Franz Liszt Festival: Celebrating the discovery of Franz Liszt’s Villa d’Este Piano’, The Riverside Church in the City of New York and St. Paul’s Chapel of Columbia University, September 25–30, 2001.
Saint-Évremond, Sir Politik would be. act V, scene ii, quoted in Foucault, op. cit.
Pollens, Stewart, Conservator, Department of Musical Instruments, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. Conversation with the author, January 2006.
Walker, Alan, Franz Liszt, Volume One: The Virtuoso Years, 1811—1847 (London & Boston: 1983).
FIGURES
'fig. 1' A. Göschl, 'caricatures of Liszt', Borsszem Jankó, 6 April 1873, p. 5.
'fig. 2' Franz Hanfstaengl, Franz Liszt, Munich, November 1856.
'fig. 3' Marcel Baschet, Claude Debussy, 1884 (Versailles Museum).
'fig. 4' Josef Danhauser, Franz Liszt at the Piano, 1840, Staatliche Museen, Berlin.