LISZTOMANIA

Carmen Paddock on the composer as superhero – and supervillain.

Hello, and welcome to the first essay from our summer release, Volume 20: Ken Russell’s History of the World. Here, critic Carmen Paddock talks saving classical music in Lisztomania.

On 23rd July, join us at The Cinema Museum for a rare screening of Crimes of Passion on 16mm, where print copies of the issue will be exclusively available. Tickets are now on sale here.

Carmen Paddock

Differences in tone, structure, and quality aside, the biopic largely follows one of two pathways. The first is faithful, canonical, often hagiographic – a great man or woman defined by their best known or loved qualities, often told through cinematic realism and signifiers of authenticity. The second is more subversive and anti-historical, seeking an alternate reading or new interpretation of familiar facts and faces; sometimes, these hint at deeper truths about how and why a legend is created. With cinema being one of the most accessible artistic mediums of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, these retellings go far – arguably further than history books – in shaping common understandings of their hallowed subjects.

Ken Russell’s Lisztomania (1975), a heavily stylised and fictionalised biopic of Hungarian composer and concert pianist Franz Liszt, takes the latter “revisionist” biopic stylings and applies it to the former “canonical” themes. The resulting film – as gonzo and blatantly ahistorical as it is, plays straight into popular perceptions of its primary and supporting subjects, taking those to the extreme rather than dissecting, subverting, or otherwise reworking them. History, classical music, and perhaps even Franz Liszt, have never been this cool.

The historical Franz Liszt carefully cultivated his own image and legend in the imagination of his adoring fans, scandalised critics, and musical peers. Russell picks up where Liszt left off, exploring and exploiting art’s power in the cultural imagination to make a myth out of a mortal. To this end, Russell filters Franz Liszt through the visual and audio signifiers of glam rock godhood (Russell and star Roger Daltry, of The Who, were fresh off Tommy, another psychedelic, fantastical musical retelling blending modern and classical modes, released earlier in 1975).

In broad strokes, it is true. Liszt was a prolific composer and arranger of his fellow composers’ works, a concert pianist who turned the piano sideways so his adoring (largely female) audience could see his profile, a playboy and heartthrob who left a string of broken marriages and illegitimate children across Europe, and finally a late-in-life Abbé whose Catholic faith redeemed his soul in the eyes of society. But in Lisztomania, every facet of this journey is exaggerated and translated into the vernacular of 1970s stardom, augmented through Daltry’s stunt casting and Liszt’s signature instruments: the piano and the phallus.

The film opens with him kissing the breasts of his lover Marie d’Agoult to a metronome’s tempo that she continually increases; then (still nude) he loses a swordfight to her husband and is imprisoned inside a piano set on train tracks – a recurring anxiety dream throughout Lisztomania. Hordes of teenage girls are kept at bay from his dressing room by a roadie in jeans and a tight “band” t-shirt. He writes music on his piano desk-slash-bed, wearing a key-trimmed robe, with a marble grand piano silhouette carved above his fireplace. When he goes on tour to Russia, Princess Carolyn (a fictitious figure) and her ladies-in-waiting arouse his genius – and gigantic penis – in a song-and-dance routine. When that too turns out to be a castration-anxiety nightmare, Liszt begins to consider holy-ish vows and the straight and narrow. Cue the Pope (Ringo Starr) in robes covered, not with saints, but with pictures of Judy Garland, sending Liszt on an exorcism mission to save Europe, music, and the Catholic Church.