<\/p>
On his recital tour of Britain in the early 1840s, that same historic tour when in London he first coined the term \u2018recitals\u2019 for his public performances, the composer Franz Liszt<\/a> made a detour to visit the ancestral home of Lord Byron, Newstead Abbey near Nottingham. <\/strong><\/p> His response, in letters to his lover Marie d\u2019Agoult, was ecstatic. Byron had died some 25 years earlier, and throughout Europe his influence had remained colossal \u2013 for writers and opinion formers, for aspiring poets and painters, for general readers and not least for those who espoused a radical politics.<\/p> Liszt had been reading Byron since his teens. One of the composer\u2019s early biographers, in enumerating the multiple literary influences on his creative imagination, drew attention to \u2018the strongest kinship he feels with Lord Byron, the poet, as Liszt himself admits, whom he has embraced, to whom he has abandoned himself completely\u2019. <\/p> This was in 1842; Liszt was 31 years old and at the height of his own colossal fame as a virtuoso pianist. From Newstead he had written to Marie: \u2018I know not what burning, whimsical desire comes over me from time to time to meet [Byron] in a world where we shall at last be strong and free … When I flatter myself, I say to myself that I shall perhaps one day be Byron\u2019s moon.\u2019<\/p> In France, the mania for Byron \u2013 the long, rhymed narrative poems, the semi-fictional heroes, the life of the man himself \u2013 reached its peak in Liszt\u2019s Parisian milieu of the 1830s. The poet\u2019s impact was twofold. He was revered by those wanting to create a new language of expression, but he also showed that the artist could be part of the struggle for a social liberalism. This held an extraordinary fascination for the young Liszt, whose aspirations as a pianist and composer were interwoven with a burning social conscience.<\/p> The framing context for Byron\u2019s reception in Europe was the political disruption left in the wake of Napoleon. Byron\u2019s best-selling poems \u2013 racy, outrageous, breathtakingly virtuosic (rather like Liszt\u2019s piano playing) \u2013 offered a safety valve for liberal opinion disenchanted by the failure of what people had originally believed to be Napoleonic salvation. Ambivalence regarding the prestige of Napoleon ran deep in the European psyche for many decades.<\/p> Such was Liszt\u2019s fame that critics labelled him either the Byron of the piano or the Napoleon of the piano. He was caricatured in military dress, on horseback \u2013 a lithograph from 1840 shows him looking suitably Byronic in a travelling coat, to which Liszt has proudly added, in his own hand, a stanza from Byron\u2019s poem to Thomas Moore beginning \u2018Here\u2019s a sigh to those who love me\/And a smile to those who hate\u2019 \u2013 a distillation of the Byronic hero. Liszt writes excitedly to Marie: \u2018Lady Blessington affirms that I resemble Bonaparte and Lord Byron\u2019.<\/p> \u2018As I left Newstead Abbey, the moaning of the pine trees awakened corresponding harmonies within me, and hollow voiced I sang and mused out loud. I shall write all that down one day.\u2019 Did Liszt write it down? It would be tempting to suggest that Liszt\u2019s experience at Newstead can be found in the first book of Ann\u00e9es de p\u00e8lerinage<\/a><\/strong> <\/em>(\u2018Years of Pilgrimage\u2019), which is replete with lengthy quotations from Byron\u2019s long narrative poem in four books, Childe Harold\u2019s Pilgrimage<\/em>. <\/p>‘I shall perhaps one day be Byron\u2019s moon’<\/h2>
‘I know not what burning, whimsical desire comes over me from time to time to meet Byron in a world where we shall be free’<\/h3>
‘Byron\u2019s racy, outrageous poems offered a safety valve for liberal opinion disenchanted by the failure of Napoleonic salvation’<\/h3>
A poetic pilgrimage<\/h2>