Liszt on Women
To love is to ascend into heaven.[1]
The principal women in the life of Liszt were, first Caroline de Saint-Cricq, one of his students in Paris. She was the daughter of the minister of Commerce of Charles X, who insisted the affair end. In 1833 he began his association with the Countess Marie d’Agoult and in 1834 with Felicite de Lamennais. From 1835 the countess lived with Liszt and was the mother of their children.
In 1847 Liszt met the Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, sister to the Czar of Russia, who would remain his love for the rest of his life. Their planned marriage in 1861 was prevented at the last moment by pressure from the Russian aristocracy.
In addition to the general remarks about women, the following excerpts from his correspondence are remarkable for their intimate passion and emotional insight into his own relationships.
..1832..
It was in a paroxysm of madness that I wrote you…. A strain of work, wakefulness and those violent desires (for which you know me) had set my poor head aflame. I went from right to left, then from left to right (like a sentinel in the winter, freezing), singing, declaiming, gesticulating, crying out; in a word I was delirious. Today the spiritual and the animal…are a little more evenly balanced; for the volcano of the heart is not extinguished, but is working silently, -- until when?[2]
..1834..
A man false and vulgar as you think me would not have said, “I have no love but what you give me.” I don’t take back an iota of my past life, however shameful or bitter it may have been!...not an iota. I accept everything completely, and if I were a hundred times more criminal, I would still accept everything, because I want the woman I love to be happy to forgive me. It is only from her that I would accept pardon.[3]
..1840..
Love is not justice. Love is not duty; it isn’t pleasure either, and yet it contains mysteriously all these things. There are a thousand ways to feel it, to practice it, but for those whose souls thirst for the absolute and the infinite, it is one, with neither beginning nor end.[4]
..1842..
It seems to me I have forgotten how to live…. I can attach myself to nothing; I would throw up the whole thing if you could be happy living with me again. But whether from perversity, hardness of heart, blindness of the spirit and the heart at once, I could no longer believe I was enough in your life, and as an alternative I preferred this life of vagabondage to a sickly stagnation which would have killed me without making you live. I am not deceiving myself. My life for the last three years has been nothing but a series of excitements…leading to disgust and remorse. I must spend, and spend again, life, strength, money and time, without joy in the present or hope in the future….[5]
..1844..
I have told no lies to my intimate friends. I have said flatly that you disapprove and condemn my orgiastic life, that you have therefore told me that it would be better not to meet again, and therefore that we will see each other no more….
However moved I may be at the softening of your anger, I can nevertheless not at all condemn my past. That past, Madame, was full each day of a serious and passionate devotion to yourself. The impulses and mistakes to be found there were neither lasting nor serious. The hand you promise to hold out to me some day when all is forgotten, I would be happy to seize and hold forever, but I can’t, no, I never could tell myself that it ought to have been withheld for a single instant.[6]
..1846..
Through what absence of mind, let me ask you, could you have written to me, “I do not speak to you of our affairs because I remember that your sympathies are not with us”? Frankly, if you were to tell me that I have never played any but false notes on the piano, and that my calling was that of a retail grocer, this opinion would offer, to my thinking, a greater degree of probability. Evidently, in my double character of citizen and musician, I am not even to exonerate myself from the fault you ascribe to me. Suffer me then not to dwell longer upon it, and deign for the future to spare me the pain which all suspicion of this kind would cause me.[7]
..1852..
Polish women have always inspired fervent homage, for they all have a poetic comprehension of an ideal that they reflect in their remarks, like an image ever present in a mirror that they fancy can be caught. Despising the weak and too facile pleasure of merely pleasing, they would have the pleasure of admiring those who love them. Romantic sustenance of their desires, it sometimes holds them in long hesitation between the world and the cloister where, at some moment of her life, nearly every one of them has earnestly and bitterly thought of seeking refuge.[8]
..1854..
A. Ritter is going to marry Mdlle. Wagner…., who has played in comedy at the Breslau theater, and who, by her husband’s orders, will not continue playing when she has her home to keep. Let us hope so at least![9]
..1856..
An elegant young woman, A Social Lioness, and an Artist, whom I see rather often and who will also pass through Weimar this summer is the Hungarian Princess Nako. She plays gipsy songs in a ravishing way, sketches and paints with a kind of genius and maintains at her expense a troupe of gipsy musicians whom she has shown to Meyerbeer.[10]
..1859..
Mother love is like an endless ladder of fantasy and feeling, -- moving to the point of being irritating - and one might put at both ends of the scale, in order to make the allegory more complete, the oldest magician and the most youthful fairy.[11]
..1860..
I thank my mother with reverence and tender love for her continual proofs of goodness and love. In my youth people called me a good son; it was certainly no special merit on my part, for how would it have been possible not to be a good son with so faithfully self-sacrificing a mother?[12]
..1872..
There are numberless things which lie outside of and beyond the “war of the sexes” in love, and so far as I am concerned I do not accept the thesis that “to love is to be either the anvil or the hammer.” Why the choice between these two very hard instruments? To love is to ascend into heaven.[13]
…..
I have always had the misfortune of hearing those I love best tell me that I did not love them much.[14]
..1873..
Your imagination runs away with you when you attribute to me incongruous “desires” such as, among others, that Miss F. should play at court. Frankly this kind of remark and its correlatives coming from you make me impatient, for you must know, since Rome, that I practice abstention from desires…. I also know Tasso’s graceful line, “I wish for much, hope for little, and ask for nothing.” Young ladies in bouts of melancholy like to apply it to themselves, but for my part I retain only the last two words….
As for local events, which are scarcely diverting, I inform you that Mlle Hortense Vogt (of Weimar) has been staying in Budapest for about two weeks. She had taken care to send me ardent telegrams which I never read any longer and only open by mistake when the address is in another hand – a subterfuge to which Mlle Hortense often has recourse, but without success.[15]
…..
What is the use of friendship or love if one is always looking for difficulties where there are none?[16]
..1874..
Mademoiselle Hortense Vogt appeared, very much unheralded. I took her immediately to the sacristy to entrust her to the care of the ecclesiastic, while excusing myself for not being able, in such circumstances of major absurdity, to attend mass. The said demoiselle won’t give up the idea that she has the vocation of bringing about my matrimonial happiness in spite ofmyself! I forget who it was who defined happiness as, “A blow which has more or less healed.” Alas! Mine must forego these correctives.[17]
…..
Your comments on Mlle Vogt are, as usual, most judicious. It could indeed be that behind her formal role, carried to the point of scandal, of being my imaginary and hostile wife, she may be discharging other and less exalted functions. Fortunately I am entirely blameless in this whole too laughable and odious affair. I shall avoid calling in the police as long as possible; but in Budapest it will probably be necessary to have recourse to do this…. I learned yesterday in a letter from Budapest that having been evicted at my request from the Hotel Fohner, she brazenly camped at the Hotel Hungaria; that she called on the Catholic priest and on the Protestant pastor, and that she parades everywhere as my wife, whose wedding, in a church or before the mayor, has unfortunately been hitherto delayed by intrigues of the blackest hue.[18]
…..
Something more sacred has merged with my deep love for and inexpressible gratitude to Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. She has revived my conscience and kept alive the few good qualities with which I have been endowed.[19]
…..
Although you have several times told me that, basically, no one had a decisive influence over me, you seem now to allow that the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein exerts a kind of pressure. That is not so and shall not be so. Of course I have often sought her council and advice, all the more so since she has nobly helped me in circumstances which it was hard to settle satisfactorily. However, I have never either understood or indulged in smug or surly subjection where love is concerned, and except for the dogmas of the Church, I retain my complete independence.
In fact it was my opinion which triumphed in the major decisions of the Princess for 27 years. This was so in the matter of her stay in Weimar and in Rome with all that flowed therefrom. People almost blamed her for my having entered the Vatican, of which she had no suspicion, and which I simply announced to her, one month before, as settled. On this and other matters the falsest views on the Princess have gone the rounds; I could not prevent, and only rarely contradicted them to the extent that it seemed appropriate to me to do so, knowing the superlative degree of deafness of those who donot wish to hear! So I have not been able to “defend her against her enemies” who are too powerful. Don’t speak of the “same old story,” if the wound you inflicted on me by such a reproach has not healed. Woe to me if a shadow of cowardice should darken my life![20]
…..
Your emotions and enjoyment of Tristan und Isolde are not very pleasing to me. You pen superb indictments against me in a fine style, but of these there have been too many examples both before and after Cicero. The guilty party is never sufficiently accused; in dealing severely with him one is still being too indulgent, for beneath his visible crimes there are certainly others hidden which deserve harsher punishments.
In this noble zeal, Princess, Daniel Stern anticipated you by more than a quarter of a century. Her novel of indictment, Nelida, condemns me to loss of civil rights for possessing only “sham” lofty sentiments and even genius. Consequently, I should be relegated to the company of the menials of Princes, and “dine” with the scullions and broomsweeps who, contrary to the holy Christian law, are quite wrongly despised, in the servants’ hall of Monseigneur the Grand Duke of Saxony.
Shall I complain of such a fate, decreed by noble ladies who are over-prodigal in sacrifices? Not at all. I have, thanks to this, tested the truth of the well-known maxim, “Judging by its effect, love is closer to hate than to kindly and helpful friendship.”[21]
..1877..
Peterle will do well to acquire skill in the pleasures of dancing and of courtesy toward ladies and girls, without pushing attentiveness beyond that of a gallant homme, ie., not going too far. To observe a delicate and affable measure in relations between the two sexes befits true aristocracy to which all well-born hearts belong.[22]
..1879..
Italy’s martial hero [Garibaldi] boldly declares, “Man created God, and not God man.” Now we know everything, don’t we? It only remains to know who will claim the copyright for having invented women. There are those who claim that the devil had something to do with it.[23]
..1880..
My mother loved me, and in order to please her I did not enter a seminary in 1830, for her sincere and naïve piety did not consider my vocation for the priesthood to be necessary. Thus because of her I remained a layman and have lived only too secularly…. She liked to say, “Whatever people may say against my son doesn’t offend me in the slightest, for I know what he is.”[24]
..1882..
It seems to me inadmissible for any man to exploit a woman in love for purposes of business and of his own reputation.[25]
..1883..
I think I told you Balzac’s theory that no man with fewer than seven women in his life has achieved the perfect state of a complete being. It remains to be known how many men ladies require in order to become complete too?[26]
1
[1] Letter to Olga von Mayendorff, Schillingsfurst, Oct. 10, 1872.
[2] Letter to Pierre Wolff, May 8, 1832.
[3] Letter to Marie d’Agoult.
[4] Ibid., London, 1840.
[5] Ibid., Dec. 8, 1842.
[6] Ibid., 1844.
[7] Letter to an unknown lady, 1846.
[8] Liszt, Chopin, 1852, I, 75.
[9] Letter to Bernhard Cossmann, Weimar, Sept. 8, 1854.
[10] Letter to Marie zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, Vienna, Jan. 31, 1856.
[11] Ibid., Weimar, Dec. 26, 1859.
[12] Princess Caroline Sayn-Wittgenstein, Weimar, Sept. 14, 1860.
[13] Letter to Olga von Mayendorff, Schillingsfurst, Oct. 10, 1872.
[14] Ibid., Vienna, Oct. 28, 1872.
[15] Ibid., Budapest, Feb. 4, 1873.
[16] Ibid., Dec/ 13. 1873.
[17] Ibid., Horpacs, Jan. 31, 1874.
[18] Ibid., Feb. 8, 1874.
[19] I bid., Budapest, April 10, 1874.
[20] Ibid., April 27, 1874.
[21] Ibid., Rome, June 22, 1874.
[22] Ibid., Budapest, Dec. 31, 1877.
[23] Ibid., Bayreuth, Aug. 28, 1879.
[24] Ibid., Rome, Oct. 30, 1880.
[25] Ibid., Jan. 20, 1882.
[26] Ibid., Venice, Jan. 7, 1883.