The Magician's Hands
& the Abbé's Robe

You are sitting in the audience at the Théâtre de l'Odéon when Niccolò Paganini walks onstage. You have been living in Paris for eight years, teaching piano to the daughters of aristocrats, writing a little, performing occasionally. You are considered a good pianist. What happens over the next hour in the Odéon is different from anything you have ever experienced. Paganini plays the violin in ways that should not be physically possible. He plays three parts simultaneously. He plays entire pieces on a single string after cutting the others. He performs his own compositions, which are technically insane and emotionally overwhelming.

You leave the concert and go home and stay up most of the night writing in your journal. You have understood something: Paganini is not just a performer. He is a creator whose medium is the performance itself. The composer writes the notes; Paganini writes what happens when those notes enter the air of a concert hall and hit a human nervous system. You decide, that night, that you will do for the piano what Paganini has done for the violin.

Countess Marie d'Agoult is 29, married to a French count, and one of the most intellectually distinguished women in Parisian society. You have been in love with each other for a year. She is not happy in her marriage. You are not interested in conventional arrangements. Paris in 1835 has very clear ideas about what happens to women who leave their husbands for musicians, however famous: social ruin, legal vulnerability, separation from their children.

You elope together to Geneva in the spring of 1835. The scandal is immediate and severe. Her husband retains custody of her older children. She will eventually write novels under the pen name Daniel Stern and become a significant literary figure in her own right. But first she will spend seven years following you through Switzerland, Italy, and the concert halls of Europe, bearing you three children — including Cosima, who will marry Richard Wagner.

The Danube floods catastrophically in the winter of 1838. The lower districts of Pest — then a separate city from Buda — are under several feet of water. Thousands of people are left homeless. You are performing in Vienna when the news arrives. You were born in Hungary — in Raiding, in what is now Austria — to a Hungarian father and German-Austrian mother. You speak no Hungarian. You have lived in Paris for most of your life. Your relationship to "Hungary" is primarily symbolic and romantic. But when the flood happens, you feel it as a personal matter.

You give ten concerts in Vienna, donating all proceeds to Hungarian flood relief. You then travel to Pest and Budapest and perform more concerts. The audiences are extraordinary. For the first time in your life, you are surrounded by people who treat you not as a foreign celebrity but as a returning hero. The Hungarian national feeling in this period is intense — it is the early stirrings of the independence movement that will culminate in the 1848 revolution — and you are swept up in it completely.

"Lisztomania" — a word coined by Heinrich Heine — is at its peak. Women in the concert hall faint during your performances. You discard a white glove while walking to the stage; three women fight over it. A Hungarian countess reportedly wears a locket containing your discarded cigar stub. The composer Robert Schumann's wife Clara, herself one of the great pianists of the age, writes in her diary that she has never witnessed anything like the effect you produce on an audience.

You have also done something unprecedented in 1840: you performed an entire concert alone, from memory, without an orchestra, an opera singer, or any supporting act. You called it a "musical soliloquy." Others called it a "recital." No pianist had ever done this before — the word "recital" in its modern meaning didn't exist before you invented the thing it describes. The concert hall was full anyway. It was more than full.

You stop touring. After eight years of the most celebrated concert career in European history — playing in literally hundreds of cities, performing for royalty, earning enormous sums, becoming the most famous musician alive — you accept a permanent position as Kapellmeister at the small court of Weimar and more or less stop giving public concerts. The decision shocks everyone. You are 36. You are at the absolute height of your powers. You could command any fee, any hall, any audience in Europe.

What you tell people is that you want to compose. What you don't say, but what becomes increasingly apparent over the following years, is that you have understood something about the relationship between performance and creation: performing at the level you perform is consuming and ultimately hollow. It is you serving the music. You want to make the music. You want to invent new forms — the symphonic poem, the thematic transformation — that don't exist yet and that will outlast your hands.

You have been trying to marry Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein for fourteen years. She is a Polish-Russian princess who left her husband in 1848 to be with you. The Catholic Church has complicated the situation at every step: her marriage was declared valid, then invalid, then valid again. In 1861, you and Carolyne were hours away from a wedding in Rome when it was called off at the last moment — one account says by direct order of the Pope, on the basis of her husband's renewed objection.

You have been living in Rome since 1861, in the Villa d'Este and occasionally in a monastery on the Aventine hill. The religious feeling that has always run through your life — and through your music — has deepened into something more. On April 25th, 1865, you receive the four minor orders of the Catholic Church: doorkeeper, lector, exorcist, and acolyte. You become Abbé Liszt. You will wear the cassock for the rest of your life.

You teach. Every summer in Weimar, young pianists come to study with you from across Europe and America — sometimes thirty or forty students in residence at once. The classes are masterclasses: you sit beside the piano, the student plays, you comment, you demonstrate. You do not charge a single student a fee. You maintain this practice for the last twenty years of your life. Among your students: Hans von Bülow, Carl Tausig, Rafael Joseffy, Alexander Siloti, Eugen d'Albert, Moriz Rosenthal, Emil von Sauer, and — through them — virtually every major pianist of the 20th century. The Liszt pedagogical tradition runs through every conservatory in the world.

Why do you teach without payment? The question comes up occasionally, and your answer is always some variation of the same thing: knowledge that isn't passed on is wasted. You were given your gifts. You were taught, first by Czerny in Vienna when you were ten. The chain must continue. It is not charity; it is how music survives.

You are composing late piano pieces that nobody around you understands. Nuages gris (Grey Clouds) is harmonically ambiguous to the point of having no clear key. La lugubre gondola uses harmonies that will not appear in mainstream music for another forty years. Bagatelle sans tonalité — "Bagatelle without tonality" — is exactly what it says: a piece that abandons the tonal system that all Western music had operated within for three hundred years. Richard Wagner, who has heard these pieces, tells you that you have gone too far.

Your students don't know what to do with them. The publishers are not interested. The audiences who adored your performances in the 1840s expect lush, dramatic Romanticism, and what you are writing now is something else entirely — angular, strange, compressed, without the resolution they expect. You write them anyway. "I can wait," you tell a friend. "The future will understand."