Franz Liszt, Volume 3
The Final Years: 1861-1886
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
The third volume in Alan Walker's magisterial biography of Franz Liszt.
"You can't help but keep turning the pages, wondering how it will all turn out: and Walker's accumulated readings of Liszt's music have to be taken seriously indeed."-D. Kern Holoman, New York Review of Books
"A conscientious scholar passionate about his subject. Mr. Walker makes the man and his age come to life. These three volumes will be the definitive work to which all subsequent Liszt biographies will aspire."-Harold C. Schonberg, Wall Street Journal
"What distinguishes Walker from Liszt's dozens of earlier biographers is that he is equally strong on the music and the life. A formidable musicologist with a lively polemical style, he discusses the composer's works with greater understanding and clarity than any previous biographer. And whereas many have recycled the same erroneous, often damaging information, Walker has relied on his own prodigious, globe-trotting research, a project spanning twenty-five years. The result is a textured portrait of Liszt and his times without rival."-Elliot Ravetz, Time
"The prose is so lively that the reader is often swept along by the narrative. . . . This three-part work . . . is now the definitive work on Liszt in English and belongs in all music collections."-Library Journal
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The last quarter-century of Liszt's life was filled with dramatic turns, contrasts and emotional storms, like the Hungarian composer's romantic music. The buoyant man of the world retreated into a monastery near Rome (1863-1865), emerging as a Roman Catholic cleric. His elder daughter, Blandine, died from a breast operation, and Liszt tried his best to break up the adulterous relationship of his younger daughter, Cosima, with composer Richard Wagner, whom she married after concealing the out-of-wedlock births of three children by Wagner from her first husband, pianist and Wagner-worshiper Hans von Bulow. Shuttling endlessly between Rome, Weimar, Budapest, Paris, Vienna, overworked, overdrinking Liszt suffered a nervous breakdown in 1877 and struggled with suicidal impulses. Polish princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, whose wedding to Liszt was canceled at the last minute in 1861 because of her family's meddling, betrayed him in 1881 by inserting an anti-Semitic chapter into Liszt's revised book on Bohemian music. In this final volume of an extraordinary biography, Walker, a professor of music in Ontario, shows how Liszt's universal despair gave rise to the pathbreaking, proto-modernist music of his later years. A rarity among composers' biographies, this full-bodied portrait combines lively writing and impeccable scholarship. Photos.
