On his recital tour of Britain in the early 1840s, that same historic tour when in London he first coined the term ‘recitals’ for his public performances, the composer Franz Liszt made a detour to visit the ancestral home of Lord Byron, Newstead Abbey near Nottingham.
His response, in letters to his lover Marie d’Agoult, was ecstatic. Byron had died some 25 years earlier, and throughout Europe his influence had remained colossal – for writers and opinion formers, for aspiring poets and painters, for general readers and not least for those who espoused a radical politics.
Liszt had been reading Byron since his teens. One of the composer’s early biographers, in enumerating the multiple literary influences on his creative imagination, drew attention to ‘the strongest kinship he feels with Lord Byron, the poet, as Liszt himself admits, whom he has embraced, to whom he has abandoned himself completely’.
'I shall perhaps one day be Byron’s moon'
This was in 1842; Liszt was 31 years old and at the height of his own colossal fame as a virtuoso pianist. From Newstead he had written to Marie: ‘I know not what burning, whimsical desire comes over me from time to time to meet [Byron] in a world where we shall at last be strong and free ... When I flatter myself, I say to myself that I shall perhaps one day be Byron’s moon.’
'I know not what burning, whimsical desire comes over me from time to time to meet Byron in a world where we shall be free'
In France, the mania for Byron – the long, rhymed narrative poems, the semi-fictional heroes, the life of the man himself – reached its peak in Liszt’s Parisian milieu of the 1830s. The poet’s impact was twofold. He was revered by those wanting to create a new language of expression, but he also showed that the artist could be part of the struggle for a social liberalism. This held an extraordinary fascination for the young Liszt, whose aspirations as a pianist and composer were interwoven with a burning social conscience.
The framing context for Byron’s reception in Europe was the political disruption left in the wake of Napoleon. Byron’s best-selling poems – racy, outrageous, breathtakingly virtuosic (rather like Liszt’s piano playing) – offered a safety valve for liberal opinion disenchanted by the failure of what people had originally believed to be Napoleonic salvation. Ambivalence regarding the prestige of Napoleon ran deep in the European psyche for many decades.
'Byron’s racy, outrageous poems offered a safety valve for liberal opinion disenchanted by the failure of Napoleonic salvation'
Such was Liszt’s fame that critics labelled him either the Byron of the piano or the Napoleon of the piano. He was caricatured in military dress, on horseback – a lithograph from 1840 shows him looking suitably Byronic in a travelling coat, to which Liszt has proudly added, in his own hand, a stanza from Byron’s poem to Thomas Moore beginning ‘Here’s a sigh to those who love me/And a smile to those who hate’ – a distillation of the Byronic hero. Liszt writes excitedly to Marie: ‘Lady Blessington affirms that I resemble Bonaparte and Lord Byron’.
A poetic pilgrimage
‘As I left Newstead Abbey, the moaning of the pine trees awakened corresponding harmonies within me, and hollow voiced I sang and mused out loud. I shall write all that down one day.’ Did Liszt write it down? It would be tempting to suggest that Liszt’s experience at Newstead can be found in the first book of Années de pèlerinage (‘Years of Pilgrimage’), which is replete with lengthy quotations from Byron’s long narrative poem in four books, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
But he had already used several of these quotations as epigraphs for his earliest versions of the pieces, gathered as Impressions et Poésies several years before his visit to Newstead. He had already ‘written it down’. So all that can be said with certainty is that Liszt’s reverence for Byron’s poetry was confirmed by Newstead, further inflamed; his ambition was to be not only ‘the Byron of the piano’ but of composition too.
Liszt and his Byron-inspired masterpiece
Liszt spent the next ten years failing to finish an opera based on a Byron text. But he did transform Années de pèlerinage – Première Année: Suisse. This masterful work is indubitably Byron-inspired: six of the nine pieces are associated with him, all bearing quotations from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. And even before we are directed to the quotations in the score there is an echo of Byron in the title, easy to overlook for English speakers: Liszt would first have known the poem in its French translation, Le pèlerinage de Childe Harold.
In the poem’s third canto, the outcast Harold (Byron in thin disguise) is in Switzerland where he finds solace among the mountain peaks and beside Lac Léman. Liszt followed 20 years later, he too as a kind of outcast accompanying Marie in secret to Geneva where she was to give birth to their first child, Blandine.
The first version of Première Année: Suisse’s final piece, ‘Les cloches de Genève’, was dedicated to Blandine and bore lines from Byron that encapsulated Romanticism’s attitude to nature: ‘I live not in myself but I become/ Portion of that around me.’ Significantly, Liszt discarded the dedication in the final version, as well as the quotation, and he filled in the missing letters of the original title ‘Les cloches de G...’
'A concealment of sexual delight'
The secretiveness of the original, the concealment of place, had also been a concealment of sexual delight. In the mid-1850s, when Liszt’s relationship with Marie had disintegrated and had become the target of lies and recriminations, he drew a veil over the origins of this beautiful piece — he was now living in Weimar with Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. The middle section in the final version is totally new, a hymn to love, a memory of ecstasy that maintains secrecy by being unacknowledged.
The sixth piece, the magnificent ‘Vallée d’Obermann’, began life as a response not to Byron but to Étienne Pivert de Senancour’s epistolary novel Obermann. First published, and ignored, in 1804, the novel was republished in 1832 and at once had a cult following in Liszt’s literary milieu. But as a type, the character Obermann anticipates the moody Byronic hero, albeit frustratingly passive rather than heroically active.
For the final version of Années, Liszt strengthened this Byronic element by adding to his two Senancour quotations a superb stanza from the third canto of Childe Harold. Maybe it was in the revised ‘Vallée d’Obermann’ that Liszt found the ‘corresponding harmonies’ that had so inspired him at Newstead, and in the piece just before it, ‘Orage’ (‘Storm’), which was written especially for the revised album and which also bears a Byron epigraph.
The authentic voice of the Byronic hero
The stanza Liszt chose for ‘Vallée d’Obermann’ begins: ‘Could I embody and unbosom now/That which is most within me, — could I wreak/My thoughts upon expression...’ This is the authentic voice of the Byronic hero with whom the poet (and Liszt too) identifies. He is lamenting his inability to compete, in poetry, with the cosmic forces of a storm.
Could he ‘wreak [his] thoughts upon expression’, find a single word that would convey the power of his creative mind, ‘and that word were Lightening’, then he would speak. ‘But as it is I live and die unheard,/With a most voiceless thought, sheathing it as a sword.’ It is, of course, a magnificent pose. Byron and Liszt knew well the power of their respective arts, and that their ‘thought’ is at the opposite pole from voiceless.
Unleashing a storm
It is a mark of the unity of conception of the whole volume of the Swiss Années that in the piece immediately preceding ‘Vallée d’Obermann’ Liszt had himself unleashed a storm. And we can notice here that the delightful ‘Eglogue’, the piece that follows, continues the story, quoting Byron’s evocation of tranquility and joy as bright day follows stormy night: ‘The morn is up again, the dewy morn,/With breath all incense, and with cheek all bloom.’
Exactly how Byron might affect the way performers perform the Swiss Années, or listeners listen to it, is a large question, one which lies at the heart of our experience of music. The journey Liszt charts through named landscapes is a wholly musical journey, an experience in musical time, but one which, through the epigraphs, asks us to reference other modes of expression.
The texts are a sign of homage and solidarity; the music does not ‘illustrate’ Byron’s world but rather exists in parallel with it. Thereby our experience of Liszt is expanded and enriched, while the music remains itself.
An audience with Franz Liszt
An 1840 oil painting by the Austrian Josef Danhauser shows Liszt at the piano, surrounded by leading figures of his literary and musical circle: the novelists Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo and George Sand, and the musicians/composers Niccolò Paganini and Gioachino Rossini. Swathed in gorgeous velvet is his lover Marie d’Agoult.
A portrait of Lord Byron hangs centre stage, but in shadow: the enormous prestige of Byron, Europe’s most renowned Romantic poet, has been subsumed by the figure of Liszt, the greatest ‘poet’ of the keyboard. An air of transfixed listening pervades the scene, to which Beethoven, the marble bust in the window, gives his blessing.
The painting was commissioned by the Viennese piano maker Conrad Graf and its message is clear, even revolutionary: Graf’s instruments are not just worthy of the greatest musicians, but are also associated with the tip of European literary culture. Playing a Graf piano will lead one into the inner secrets of cultured discourse. Hugo has lowered his book, entranced; Sand’s hand reaches across to touch the book Dumas has just closed as if to say words no longer suffice. Piano music has achieved equal status with the finest of art forms.