It is mainly the image of Liszt as music's first international superstar, and one of the Romantic Century's great Don Juans, that remains fixed in our collective memory: a slim, strikingly handsome six-footer with a flowing mane of shoulder-length hair, a piano conjurer able to summon near orchestral effects and rouse audiences to such frenzied emotional states that the poet Heinrich Heine coined the term "Lisztomania." "I think I laughed--laughed like an idiot" is how Edvard Grieg described his ecstatic reaction to Liszt's playing. George Eliot's recorded impressions of Liszt come very close to swooning.
Confronted by such a charismatic figure,...
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