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Franz Liszt: Musician, Celebrity, Superstar. By Oliver Hilmes. Translated by Stewart Spencer. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. [xiii, 353 p. ISBN 9780300182934 (cloth), $38; ISBN 9780300228755 (paperback), $25.] Illustrations, endnotes, bibliography, index.
Summarizing the life, career, music, and influence of Franz Liszt is a colossal undertaking. Oliver Hilmes approaches the task from the perspective of Liszt's celebrity, comparing the Romantic-era virtuoso to superstars of today. Certainly an abundance of biographies that frame Liszt's life through spectacle already exist, but they often do little more than disseminate rumors and perpetuate myths, much to the vexation of modern scholars. Hilmes conveys the authentic alongside the astonishing by supporting this narrative with reliable sources. Engaging a wealth of prior scholarship, and incorporating several unpublished primary sources, he brings us a step closer to fully appreciating Liszt's superstardom. Stewart Spencer provides the English translation of Hilmes biography, originally published in German as Liszt: Biographie eines Superstars (Munich: Siedler, 2011).
Hilmes organizes the seven chapters of his text chronologically as a series of vignettes that divide Liszt's life into broad categories; most of the new scholarship appears in chapters one, five, six, and seven. Regarding unpublished sources, Hilmes draws from eleven archives, most extensively the Goethe- und Schiller-Archiv, the Nationalarchiv der Richard-WagnerStiftung Bayreuth, and the Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar. This material consists primarily of correspondence from Adam Liszt, Carolyne de Sayn-Wittgenstein, and Cosima Wagner. Although most of these documents do not significantly change current scholarship on Liszt, Hilmes includes some provocative entries.
Chapter 1, "Childhood and Adolescence," takes the reader from the background of Liszt's parentage through the death of his father, Adam, providing an overview of Liszt's training and success as a child prodigy. More importantly, this chapter presents a side of Adam that balances fatherly pride with entrepreneurship as he bolsters his son's budding career. Peculiar among Hilmes's sources is one of Adam's unpublished letters in which he states his plan to give a concert, yet his son is the one performing (p. 15). This misstatement could suggest evidence of teamwork, a duo of father and son. Hilmes establishes how Liszt's superstardom resulted from Adam's unyielding advocacy among aristocratic patrons and wise entrepreneurial strategy.
Various influences from Liszt's early adulthood comprise much of chapter 2, "Rehearsing and...