Lola Montez and the Poisoned Nom de Plume Read Free Page B

trinkets with his likeness and wore them everywhere; they devoured cakes in the shape of his piano. They would faint dead away at the actual sight and sound of him, playing his music, or even in passing. His phenomenal success as a pianist and the furor of his celebrity was being referred to as “Lisztomania.” What kind of man could he be, to cause such turmoil? Interest piqued, I read on, holding the paper into the light. The likeness revealed him to be angular, thin, with long hair. Not particularly handsome but—so it seemed—overwhelmingly charismatic. Everybody said so. “He will play in Köthen on Saturday, 24 February, and at Dessau on Sunday, 25 February,” the notice declared, then gave the concert hall addresses and other details.
    It was as if a large bell suddenly tolled in my head, violently clanging. I did a rapid calculation—forget Hamburg: Dessau is near Dresden, is it not?—then rushed over to speak to the driver. There and then I decided that, no matter what damage it would do to my dwindling funds, I, Lola Montez, must meet this god who had captured and conquered the headstrong runaway called Fame. Whatever it took, I would learn its secrets from him—and whatever else I could get.

Lisztomania
    Mon Dieu , the man could play! Sitting in the audience, hardly able to believe that I’d managed to get myself there in time, I let the cascading notes from the piano rejuvenate my spirit. Franz Liszt, in profile, was a demon of intensity; I had never heard anything like the sounds and emotion that he could produce from that inert-looking instrument. His long body was mostly still and concentrated, except for the vibrations of strength and power I could sense emanating from his spine. Occasionally his entire body would burst into action, like watching a kind of spontaneous combustion, then it would calm again, barely rippling, simply vibrating with the sounds he was creating. His hands were spellbinding, as the fingers danced and ripped across the keys with breath-taking speed.
    What was this man before me made of? Alive to every second of cascading sound, I reviewed what I’d managed to glean: he’d been a child prodigy, born to simple Hungarian parents; had played every day of his life from the age of three or something astonishing; he’d performed before royalty many times. As a child, he’d even met Beethoven, when the composer was ill, deaf and about to die. Liszt had begun touring extensively in recent years, some papers reporting that it was to escape from a souring relationship with the mother of his children, Countess Marie d’Agoult. They were not married; this was a well-known source of scandal, but an old tale by now. Other reports claimed that Liszt gave many of his phenomenal earnings to various charities in the cities in which he played. Why on earth would he do that, I asked myself? Men, it’s true, have a longer shelf life—they can go on with their art form even if their attractiveness in body and face has left them. In our day and age, women are not generally granted such leniency.
    As the music’s intensity increased, Liszt threw his mane of fair hair back with a swift lift and twist of his chin. He appeared to be in his early thirties, though his face was careworn and full of lines across the brow.
    In order to examine him more closely, I wiggled my chair slightly further to the left, bumping it up against that of a crusty-looking dowager with large brown eyes, who raised her eyebrows and pursed her lips. I smiled at her, then pinned my gaze back to the elevated platform and its two pianos.
    The room we were in was pretty, decorated in pale pinks and ivories; the management must have squeezed over four hundred of these chairs into the place, and there were also men standing at the back, mashed in tightly together—perhaps another fifty or sixty. I’d been lucky to talk my way in, for this concert had been oversold for the past week, almost as soon as the announcement had