Franz Liszt to Marie d'Agoult
One evening in late 1832, or early the next year, the young Hungarian pianist Franz Liszt arrived at the home of a fashionable aristocrat, the Marquise La Vayer. There he met Marie d'Agoult, a 27 year old countess, icily beautiful, but unhappily married and the mother of two young daughters. In her Memoirs, Marie described the man she saw,
"...a tall figure, excessively thin, a pale face with great sea-green eyes in which glistened swift flashes of light like waves catching the sunlight...features at once suffering and powerful."
Their meeting began 10 years of passion, joy, and bitterness for them both. Liszt's letter, written sometime in 1834 and reproduced here, captures the conflicting emotions that later consumed them.
December 1834
Marie! Marie!
Oh let me repeat that name a hundred times,
a thousand times over;
for three days now it has lived within me, oppressed me,
set me afire.
I am not writing to you, no, I am close beside you. I see you,
I hear you...
Eternity in your arms...Heaven, hell,
all is within you and even more than all...
Oh! Leave me free to rave in my delirium.
Mean, cautious, narrow reality is no longer enough for me.
We must live out lives to the full,
our loves, our sorrow...!
Oh! you believe me capable of
self-sacrifice, chastity, temperance
and piety, do you not?
But let no more be said of this...
it is for you to question, to draw conclusions,
to save me as you see fit.
Let me be mad, senseless
since you can do nothing, nothing
at all for me.
It is good for me to speak to you now.
This is to be! To be!!!
Marie, intelligent and sophisticated, was
"six inches of snow covering twenty feet of lava,"
as a contemporary put it. She came from a family of wealthy bankers with a history of wild liaisons and mental instability. Despairing of finding a husband she liked among those her family thought acceptable, she simply decided to take the next one they offered. The comte Charles d'Agoult (1790-1875), a war-wounded army officer, was 15 years her senior, kind, and self-effacing to the point of invisibility. realizing how different Marie was from him, he offered her freedom from the marriage, should she ever want it. The 21 year old Liszt seemed to offer her a reason for accepting the generous offer.
Soon Marie and Liszt were meeting regularly. As lovers they had much to offer each other: for Liszt, the security of Marie's wealth, the glitter of her connections, and the intimate and loving audience an artist craves; and for Marie, possession of a man who captivated everybody, a genius for her to inspire. In Europe, rich wives often took lovers. That her lover was a musician, a paid servant of the salons from some obscure village n Hungary, added drama to scandal. It broke not only the bonds of marriage but the boundaries of class as well.
However, there were misgivings. In September 1834, Liszt went to Brittany to stay wit a friend, a priest named the Abbé Lamennais. In this quiet retreat, Liszt confronted the conflict within him, his private, meditative side against the public, passionate pianist. Then in October, Marie's eldest daughter, six year old Louise, took ill and died after two fevered months. Marie was so overwrought that when her other small daughter Claire tried to console her, she abruptly sent her off to a convent to be cared for by others. Liszt wrote anxious letters. Marie did not reply. But when they met again early in 1835, they put aside their hesitations; when Marie found she was pregnant, they decided to elope. To avoid the worst effects of scandal and to find creative solitude, they moved to Switzerland. Parisians joked that Liszt carried her off in a piano.
On May 26, Marie wrote to her husband from Switzerland:
"I have no wrongs to reproach you with, you have always been full of affection and devotion for me; you have always thought of me, never of yourself, and yet I have been truly unhappy.
This was her only apology. She was leaving him. He stayed at home and raised their daughter Claire, until she, in turn, married and claimed the family home. Charles d'Agoult lived out his last years in lodgings in Paris.
Marie and Liszt still not married, began a life of many addresses, in Switzerland, Italy, France, and Germany. But they were most happy early in their relationship in Italy, where two of their three children were born. In September 1837, Liszt advised the young poet, Louis de Ronchaud,
"When you write the story of two happy lovers, place them on the shores of Lake Como."
But it was there at Bellagio that Marie also began to suffer nervous fears, remorse, and self-doubt. Could she sustain the role she had taken on, to shelter Liszt so that he could write his music? Entries in her diary express these anxieties with remarkable frankness.
"I feel myself an obstacle to his life; I'm no good to him. I cast sadness and discouragement over his days."
She had underestimated his need to exhaust himself at the piano, to court and overwhelm an audience. In response to the public's urgings, his career as the greatest virtuoso pianist the world had ever seen gathered pace, concert after concert, town after town, from Lisbon to Moscow, from Cork to Constantinople. A frenzy of performances separated him from Marie for months on end, and rumors linked him with other women. Behind each triumph Marie sensed, sometimes correctly, an infidelity. Her bitterness engulfed them both. In 18393, after relations between them had broken down, Marie returned to Paris. Liszt wrote from Utrecht in December 1842:
"the day is cold and dark. The only ray that comes to me, the sole source of light and warmth, is my memory of you, dear Marie. I think back to our awakenings in Como and Florence...I feel I have forgotten how to live."
The final break came in 1844, when rumors linked Liszt with the dancer Lola Montez. The affair almost certainly never happened, but the damage was nonetheless done. Marie wrote,
"I am willing to be your mistress, but not one of your mistresses,"
and communication between them broke down.
Seventeen years later, they met again in Paris. Marie, who had written a novel based on her life with Liszt, was a figure in Parisian society. Liszt was living with Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein. He still triumphed in Europe, celebrated as a composer as well as a performer. Liszt kissed his former lover and, referring to spiritual roots that Marie had never begun to understand, said:
"Marie, let me use the language of a simple countryman. God bless you. Wish me no evil."
It was their last meeting. She told a friend,
"It is still he, and he alone, who makes me feel the divine mystery of life. With his departure I feel the emptiness around me and I shed tears." |
