Liszt Was Music's First Super Star

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The women who screamed and swooned for the 19th Century piano virtuoso Franz Liszt set the pattern for fans in our own time – from The Beatles to Justin Bieber.


By Clemency Burton-Hill

17 August 2016


The spectacle of young women shrieking, sobbing, and swooning at the sight of their musical idols might seem like a peculiarly modern phenomenon. You might think it first emerged in the 1950s and ‘60s with Elvis and Beatlemania, and was given a new lease of life in our own age where One Directioners and Beliebers battle it out to prove they are the most loyal pop fans on the planet. But the phenomenon is nothing new. And surprisingly, it has its roots not in post-war popular recorded music, but in the classical concert halls of 19th -Century Europe, where an outrageously talented young Hungarian named Franz Liszt overcame a very poor background to become a bona fide ‘celebrity’. (According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was first used in the way we use it now in the 1830s, as Liszt rose to fame.) The ultimate classical superstar – even more so than his musical hero, the violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini – this legendary composer, pianist and pedagogue unleashed what his biographer Dr Oliver Hilmes describes as “a highly infectious strain of Lisztomania that gripped Europe for years at a time”.



Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was a child prodigy who began casting his spell on audiences in Vienna, Paris and London at a young age, not just for his preternaturally gifted technique and fine musical imagination but also for the distinctive air he cultivated at the piano, tossing his shoulder-length locks and swaying hypnotically over the keyboard as he played. During a period of eight years, he gave around a thousand recitals – “an incredible total,” Hilmes stresses. “In the process, he effectively invented the profession of the international concert pianist. Crowned heads of state paid court to him, women threw themselves at his feet and others lost their reason. The popular press of the time reported at length on Liszt’s concerts and at even greater length on the numerous escapades that fuelled their feverish interest in him.”

Classical music audiences have a reputation for being decorous if not downright prim, but such was Liszt’s broad appeal, says Hilmes, that “there were times when the enthusiasm triggered by his public appearances bordered on delirium, and he became a figure on whom contemporaries projected all manner of erotic fantasies and secret desires. There were women who forgot everything, including their family’s good name and their refined upbringing, to be close to their god. One eyewitness recalled that ‘on one occasion a woman snatched up a half-smoked cigar that Liszt had cast aside and in spite of repeatedly retching she continued to smoke it with feigned delight’. Baronesses and countesses tore at each other’s hair in trying to lay hands on a glass or handkerchief that Liszt had used.”

Screaming, cheering, swooning

‘Lisztomania’ was a term first coined by the 19th Century German poet and Liszt’s contemporary, Heinrich Heine. But such behaviour – or its equivalents – wouldn’t exactly feel out of place in the 21st Century. Dr Ruth Deller, Principal Lecturer in Media and Communication at Sheffield Hallam University and an expert in fan behaviour, points out that “some of the activities that fans engage in today, we can recognise in the fans of Franz Liszt. Those that were reported at the time include his fans’ emotional and physical responses – screaming, cheering, swooning – and their devotion to following him as he performed in different venues. These kinds of activities have long typified fandom and still do.” Deller suggests that the stereotype of the “screaming, swooning female fan” may even have a basis in the contemporary press coverage of Liszt’s concerts.

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www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160817-franz-liszt-the-worlds-first-musical-superstar