INTERVIEW
In a letter of November 1835, the 23-year-old Franz Liszt confessed that the virtuoso life was not for him. He had recognised within himself an ‘inner thread’, spiritual in nature, which would compel him to turn away from both performing and writing in the style which had won him the kind of acclaim now routinely visited upon pop stars and football players.
‘He had wanted to be a priest as a teenager,’ remarks the pianist Saskia Giorgini, ‘and his parents stopped him. So there was this conflict between his life, and what people would consider sinful. And this was all fascinating to me, because I grew up in Italy. I heard lots of this kind of talk, in church. All the things that you shouldn’t do, or you will end up in hell. He was suffering from an inner conflict, but this can give us creative power.’
Liszt went on to outline a three-year plan of action. Alongside what became the , he planned a cycle which, by contrast, would draw its inspiration not from the piano, but from poetry, and more specifically the work of the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine. For a title to
