Liszt: Stage Storm and Charity

Franz Liszt was called “the Paganini of the piano,” and people who witnessed him at his peak insisted that no description could capture the excitement. Other virtuosi—Hummel, Herz, Thalberg—could overwhelm audiences with brilliance, but Liszt added something rarer: intellect, imagination, and poetry, fused to a seemingly limitless technique.

He didn’t simply “perform”; he conquered the room. He would stride on stage like a general, tear off his gloves, rake his fingers through his hair, and attack the keyboard as if it were a battlefield. The audience—especially the women, the stories always add—would lose all restraint: jewels thrown onto the platform, swoons, rushes to the footlights, even fights over broken piano strings as trophies.

Yet the same man could be astonishingly generous. Like Jenny Lind among singers, Liszt became a symbol of giving. When the Danube flooded and left thousands of Hungarians homeless, Liszt—then in Italy—rushed to Vienna and began a series of benefit concerts. For two months he played almost constantly, pouring money into relief for his countrymen. Accounts claim the total raised reached vast sums. Whatever the exact figure, the pattern was clear: fame for him was a means to help as well as to dazzle.