To call it a “triumph” would be a dramatic understatement. There were eighty works performed in 21 concerts, played over the course of 10 weeks. When he was finally through with Berlin in early March, he exited town in a coach pulled by a half-dozen white horses, and a prince seated at his side. A small army of students followed him to Brandenburg Gate. Crowds lined the streets shouting their farewells, the king and queen waving to the composer through the windows of their palace.
He exited, “not like a king,” said poet, musician and sometimes-collaborator, Ludwig Rellstab, “but as a king.”
It was during those two-and-a-half months that Franz Liszt became a musical superstar. He’d arrived in the Prussian capital shortly before Christmas. A December 27 recital offered a radical contrast from the relatively lukewarm reception the Hungarian composer received in England a year prior. The crowd was enraptured. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV was in attendance with various princes and princesses. So, too, were peers like Mendelssohn and Spontini, all come to pay respect to the pianist.
That evening at Singakademie was, by all accounts, a spectacular debut. “Not since Paganini have I heard such a magisterial musician,” the German writer, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, noted in his diary. “He ended with a ‘Chromatic Galop’ that finished me off: he had total control of my pulse, and his playing caused it to race so much that I grew quite faint.”
He wouldn’t be alone in describing a kind of physiological sensation at the hands of Liszt. “Hundreds of women wore gloves bearing his likeness Many were robbed of their senses by him,” Adalbert Cohnfeld would note in the German newspaper, Abend-Zeitung, not long after the composer left town. “Indeed, everyone wanted to lose their wits over him. An art dealer prepared glass-paste brooches bearing his likeness and sold them as items of jewelry, thousands sought to beg or borrow his favors and his money.”
Over the course of the next few years, audiences across Europe transitioned from polite applause to all-out warfare. They battled over Liszt’s velvet gloves and silk handkerchiefs, sometimes tearing them to shreds in the process. Some attempted to cut locks of his hair, and when his piano broke a string, audience members would charge the instrument, in hopes of taking home a souvenir.
In one infamous incident, a fan watched Liszt toss a cigar butt into the gutter. She quickly pounced on the detritus, snatched it from the street and placed it inside a locket bearing the monogram “FL” written in diamonds.
It was Heinrich Heine who coined the term while attending a concert in Paris. Writing his annual musical roundup for 1844, the Düsseldorf-born poet suggested the reaction to be medical in nature – a manner of possession that seized the bodies of those in attendance,
[W]hat tremendous rejoicing and applause!—a delirium unparalleled in the annals of furor! And what is the real cause of this phenomenon? The solution of the question belongs rather to the province of pathology than to that of aesthetics. The electric action of a demonic nature on a closely pressed multitude, the contagious power of the ecstasy, and perhaps a magnetism in music itself, which is a spiritual malady which vibrates in most of us—all these phenomena never struck me so significantly or so painfully as in this concert of Liszt.
It was, in his words, “Lisztomania.” Where the suffix is uttered in quaint – or even mocking – tones in contemporary culture, many at the time wondered aloud whether the music was truly causing some manner of mass hysteria among concert attendees. The term “Liszt fever” was, fittingly, sometimes used interchangeably.
For his part, Heine could find no root cause for the condition. He was, after all, a poet, not a doctor. He did, however, consult one in a vain attempt to determine the origin of the highly contagious disease,
What is the reason of this phenomenon? The solution of this question belongs to the domain of pathology rather than that of aesthetics. A physician […] whom I asked to explain the magic our Liszt exerted upon the public, smiled in the strangest manner, and at the same time said all sorts of things about magnetism, galvanism, electricity, of the contagion of the close hall filled with countless wax lights and several hundred perfumed and perspiring human beings, of historical epilepsy, of the phenomenon of tickling, of musical cantharides, and other scabrous things, which, I believe have reference to the mysteries of the bona dea.
Not all were gripped by the phenomenon, however. Contemporaries Chopin, Mendelssohn and Schumann were said to sickened by the display, later growing to despise Liszt for it.
It was in Paris that the critics attempt to bring the composer down to earth through the sheer force of satirical criticism. In the pages of the art paper, La Sylphide, one writer mocked Liszt’s time in Berlin,
For a long time M. Liszt has been merely ridiculous. We laughed at his long hair and his great saber. His last trip to Germany begins to make him odious. Today, this Word of the piano is vainly trying to change into a man, growing a body, hat, cane, boots, like every Tom, Dick, and Harry, sticking a pince-nez to his eyebrows and deigning to watch the crowd pass by on the boulevard.
He added that his exit from the city was facilitated by a coach “drawn by six coal-black horses.”
Sources:
Franz Liszt: Volume 1 by Alan Walker
Franz Liszt: Musician, Celebrity, Superstar by Oliver Hilmes
Lisztomania https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/celebrity/lisztomania