Franz Liszt, photographed by Nadar, March 1886. Via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
The term was coined not by a music journalist but by a poet: Lisztomania, wrote Heinrich Heine in 1844, searching for a clinical word for a phenomenon with no precedent, one that the word fan, not yet invented, would have described perfectly. At Franz Liszt’s Berlin concerts in 1841 and 1842, things happened that had never been seen in a hall: ladies snatching from one another the gloves he had forgotten on the piano, handkerchiefs torn to pieces like relics, locks of hair begged for and obtained, piano strings broken during the concert and turned into bracelets. Period documents record collecting at the edge of the clinical: cigar butts picked up where the maestro had left them and worn around the neck in lockets, and the grounds of his coffee kept in glass vials.
It would be easy to dismiss it all as period hysteria, and indeed the doctors of the day tried, debating Lisztomania as a possible contagious disease. But the phenomenon had a rock-solid basis: Liszt had invented, piece by piece, the modern piano spectacle. It was he who imposed the solo recital, one man for an entire evening, previously unthinkable, and his is the line that founded it: the concert is me. It was he who turned the piano sideways, so that the audience could see his hands and his profile, naturally; he who played from memory, who walked on stage with gloves to be slowly removed, who built the programme like a drama. Every pianist who walks on stage today is walking through a set designed by Liszt a hundred and eighty years ago.
And then there is the ending, which no rock star has ever had the nerve to imitate: in 1847, at thirty-five, at the absolute peak of the mania, Liszt stopped. He closed the career of the touring virtuoso for good, settled in Weimar to conduct, compose and teach, free of charge, generations of pupils, as his own teacher Czerny had done for him. The greatest star of the century spent half his life undoing the stardom he had invented, ended up in an abbé’s habit, and died poor by choice, having given almost everything away. Lisztomania was a disease of the audience. Patient zero, curiously, was the only one immune.