Liszt’s London Season, 1840

Abstract

THE CITY to which Liszt reintroduced himself in 1840 was the most monstrous — and the wealthiest — that the modern age had seen. Foreign visitors simultaneously loathed and adored it. He must have retained memories of what it had looked, smelt and tasted like from his visits in the mid-1820s. On those occasions he had spent many weeks following a pattern of professional engagements which he was to repeat in 1840 and 1841. As a boy prodigy he had been taken up by the ‘silver-fork society’ of members of the aristocracy and gentry who infested the fashionable streets of the West End and the ‘country houses’ in the fields around Kensington. He had played at Windsor on two occasions for George IV, and at the home of the Duchess of Kent, mother of Victoria; and he had made the short social excursions from house to house in carriages supplied by noble patrons. He gave Hummel’s popular A minor Concerto at the Philharmonic Society.¹ And he had even anticipated the later provincial tours of Britain by making a single foray in 1824 to Manchester, where he was severely outgunned as a prodigy by ‘the infant Lyra’, a miniature harpist reputedly only three years old.² He did not return to England during the 1830s which he devoted very largely to establishing his reputation as a pianist in Paris and, less frequently, in Italy, Germany and Hungary.