Judging from our travels and discussions over the past seven years, this film is highly anticipated among scholarly, educational, and music-lover communities. Why? The knowledge base regarding Franz Liszt has been so fractured and sensationalized that there has never been a serious scholarly or “publicly accessible” statement about his life and music. Ken Russell and Roger Daltry certainly don’t count!
During our research on Franz Liszt over the past five years, we have been told and encouraged in this effort by many people. Our Europeans friends, in particular, are anxious to have what they keep calling “the American point of view” on Liszt. Quite frankly, their interest in this composer tends to be somewhat provincial and territorial. The Germans only know and study the works Liszt composed during the 20+ years he lived in Germany. The French are only concerned with his childhood Parisian compositions and his philosophy. The Hungarians, well, they are only interested in his more patriotic sacred works and those prescient late works that he composed while he lived in Budapest. The rest of Europe falls into one basket or another with regards to national orientation on Liszt. No one has ever been truly interested in Liszt as a lifelong phenomena without preference to national origin and mindset. As David Zsoldos says toward the end of the film, “The EU still has a long way to go.”
We have arranged for four preview showings in the next month or so:
Brown University — Monday, October 17th at 4:00 PM (click here for more information). This showing is part of the Brown U. Liszt Festival that runs throughout the month of October. Our evening should be made up of regional faculty and students in attendance.
Weimar, Germany — This is the premiere international conference (Congress) of Liszt scholars and takes place over the weekend of the Franz Liszt bicentenary; “everyone who is anyone” in the field (as well as many of our interviewees) will be there and we should get good feedback.
Budapest, Hungary — David Zsoldos (editor of FidelioMedia.HU – the weekly Hungarian TimeOut Magazine – and one of our interviewees) has arranged a preview evening (Monday, October 24th) at the Palace of the Arts (their Carnegie Hall) in Budapest. It is an invited audience of academics and subscribers to the Palace of the Arts. More good feedback, hopefully.
UCSD — A UCSD preview is being planned for January 2012 at The Loft. The preview will be an informal coffee & dessert event followed by discussion. We plan to invite the film’s donors, principals in the music department and at Thurgood Marshall College, and our friends and the many people who have contributed in so many different ways to this film.
This is a celebrated image of Franz Liszt in his traveling coat, quite the “dandy.”
The iconic Liszt statue on Liszt Ter is in the center of Budapest amid a cluster of chic restaurants.
“Liszt Birthplace in Raiding” is a drawing of the small cottage where Franz Liszt was born. Raiding is a provincial village in the contested region of Burgenland. At the time of Liszt’s birth, it was in the Hungarian sector; today, Burgenland is a province of Austria.
The Altenburg is the home where Liszt and Princess Carolyen von sayn-Wittgenstein lived during the Weimar period, 1848-1861.
Liszt in 1886 is one of the last photographs of Franz Liszt taken just two months before his death on July 31, 1886.
As the New Year approached, Betty and I made our much-delayed trip to Italy to scout sites for the final episode of the film. Having read the many biographies and accounts of Liszt’s final years, his activities in and around Rome were a blur of motion. He lived in many different residences; his activities often overlapped and come down to us today as a confusion of associations, disjointed locations, sudden shifts, and seemingly long periods of inactivity. We chased after Liszt in Rome traipsing through narrow alleys, broad boulevards, and mountaintops that he frequented beginning in 1861. But it was one afternoon standing atop the Spanish Steps in the heart of Rome, that it suddenly became clear to us how Liszt intuitively framed his existence in Rome.
Still a man without a country, Franz Liszt built his world around the Spanish Steps. Just to the east a few blocks along Via Felice (renamed Via Sistina), he took his first Roman residence in an hostel for traveling priests; at the bottom of the steps (plazza di Spagna) he regularly met with his Italian colleague and student Giovanni Sgambati; his mistress and muse, Carolyn von Sayn-Wittgenstein, took an apartment a few blocks north on Via del Baubino; Caffe Greco was the meeting place for Liszt and his students to enjoy cigars and brandy; he frequently performed and taught at the Academy de Santa Cecilia within earshot of Carolyne’s windows; and, Santa Francesca Romana was an elegant apartment on the grounds of one of Rome’s most famous chapels and just a short walk from the Spanish Steps. These locations functioned as his secular abodes for music-making, hosting guests, and teaching.
Liszt simultaneously maintained several more remote and secluded dwellings to feed his spiritual life. The Dominican monastery atop Monte Mario in Rome, Madonna del Rosario, was his home for five years (1863-68). In it he maintained a small cell a few feet square with little more than a table, chair, a wooden bed, and a piano (with a missing “D”). Overlapping all of these dates, Liszt maintained an apartment more distant from the center of Rome in Tivoli. Via d’Este was then and is today a sprawling villa built along the contours of a cascade of waters. The fountains and cypresses of Villa d’Este became the subject of his most impressive piano compositions late in life.
For over four years, we have planned to spend a number of days shooting “talking head” interviews with the leading Liszt scholars in Europe. Thanks to the annual meeting of the 
