A journey through Switzerland

The admiration that the composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt inspired among his contemporaries, male and female, was extraordinary, and in many ways quite unprecedented. Born in 1811, he early on developed into a kind of cult figure – celebrated as a musical genius and the superstar of an epoch. In 1840, the term “Lisztomania” appeared in the feuilletons and was taken up by the German poet Heinrich Heine, who asked: “What is the reason for this phenomenon? The answer to the question lies perhaps more in the realm of pathology than aesthetics”. Regardless of the field of knowledge in which one might want to situate the issue, there is no doubt that Liszt experienced boundless adoration that was centred on both his virtuosity and his charisma.

In 1833, Marie d’Agoult – a writer, the daughter of a French aristocrat and the wife of Count Charles d’Agoult – saw Liszt for the first-ever time in a salon in Paris. She later described the lasting impression that he made on her: “When the door opened, a strange apparition presented itself to me. I write ‘apparition’, because no other word could express the extraordinary emotional response triggered in me by the most singular person I had ever seen”. Two years later, pregnant by him, she fled Paris and took up lodgings at the luxury hotel of the “Three Kings” in Basel, where Franz Liszt joined her four days later.

Marie’s mother meanwhile arrived from Frankfurt, but was reassured when her daughter promised to return to her husband and first child back in Paris. One nervous breakdown later, Marie and Liszt embarked instead on a lovers’ journey through Switzerland, taking a route from Basel via St. Gallen, Einsiedeln, Rigi-Kulm, Amsteg, Hospental, the Gotthard Pass, Hospental again, then over the Furka Pass to Goms and ultimately to Geneva. Liszt was inspired by the journey, the places they visited and the literature that he read along the way, and later put all these impressions into the first part of his Années de Pèlerinage (“Years of pilgrimage”). It is devoted to Switzerland, depicting in music its sights and sounds, from William’s Tell Chapel to Lake Walenstadt and the bells of Geneva. The Swiss pianist Oliver Schnyder will perform this work in Andermatt and will be accompanied along the route of this Swiss journey by the writer Alain Claude Sulzer, who will read texts in tune with the music and the topic of this year’s Goethe Days.