First known photo of Liszt, taken in 1843 when he was 32 years old.

Party hats and noisemakers at the ready, today we celebrate the birth of Ferencz (that’s Hungarian; Franz in German) Liszt. (Woohoo! Let’s make some noise!) He was born on October 22, 1811 – 207 years ago today – in the market town of Doborján in the Kingdom of Hungary. (Today the town is known as Raiding and it is located in Austria.)

Here’s something we read/hear with tiresome frequency: “Like, yah, Mozart was the first ROCK STAR!”

No, he wasn’t. He was an intense, brilliantly schooled composer whose music was increasingly perceived by his Viennese audience as being too long and complex.

Okay; how about: “Beethoven was the first ROCK STAR!”

Oh please.

One more try. “Liszt was the first ROCK STAR!”

That he was. (Or perhaps the second, if we choose to consider Liszt’s inspiration, the violinist Niccolò Paganini to be the first true “rock star.”)

But: Paganini or no, in terms of Liszt’s looks and his fame, the tens-of-thousands of miles he travelled on tour and the thousands of concerts he gave; in terms of the utterly whacked-out degree of adulation he received, the crazed atmosphere of his concerts, and the number of ladies (and perhaps men as well) who would have joyfully welcomed him into their boudoirs, well, Liszt was indeed the prototype for the modern rock star, a composer and pianist who in his lifetime was worshipped as a secular god.

We read that:

“When Liszt played the piano, ladies flung their jewels on the stage instead of bouquets. They shrieked in ecstasy and sometimes fainted. Those who remained mobile made a mad rush to the stage to gaze upon the features of the divine man. They fought over the green gloves he purposely left on the piano. They fished out the stubs of cigars Liszt had smoked, while others came away from the concerts with priceless relics in the form of broken strings from the pianos he had played. These cigar butts and broken strings were mounted in frames and lockets and worshipped. Liszt did not give mere concerts; they were Saturnalia.” 

“Saturnalia” indeed: they were events, happenings, mystical séances, orgies, rock concerts; they were Lisztomania (a contemporary term coined by Heinrich Heine to describe Liszt’s concerts). 

But having said all of that, it was – in the end – Liszt’s piano playing that drove his audiences to almost mystical ecstasy. For example, in 1840, the great Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen heard Liszt perform in Hamburg. Andersen, an ordinarily clear-eyed observer of human nature and manners, was entirely swept away:

“He seemed to me a demon nailed fast to the instrument whence the tones streamed forth – they came from his blood, from his thoughts. He was on the rack, his blood flowed and nerves trembled. I saw that pale face assume a brighter expression: the divine soul shone from his eyes, and from every feature; he becomes as beauteous as only spirit and enthusiasm can make their worshippers.” 

Robert Schumann heard Liszt play in Leipzig, where he reviewed the concert for the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik. 

“Liszt played. The demon began to flex his muscles. [Another “demon” reference!] He first played along with the audience, as if to feel them out, and then give them a taste of something more substantial until, with his magic, he had ensnared each and every one and could move them this way or that as he chose.