Correspondence of Franz Liszt and the Comtesse Marie d’Agoult ed. by Michael Short (review)

While it may not quite have been the “affair that held everybody shocked, spellbound and continually seeking further vicarious excitement” (p. vii) in the nineteenth century, as Michael Short characterizes it, the topsy-turvy relationship between Franz Liszt and the (married) Countess Marie d’Agoult from about 1833 through the mid-1840s ranks as a—perhaps the—foundational component of Liszt’s early career as musician, artist, thinker, and overall romantic figure. While many details of that relationship have been inevitably lost to time, it still vigorously survives thanks to a huge volume of extant correspondence that has been available to the general reader since the early 1930s, when Daniel Ollivier released two volumes of letters exchanged between his celebrated grandparents. The scholarly value of these letters was enhanced significantly in 2001, when the French musicologists Serge Gut and Jacqueline Bellas released a critical edition of the correspondence (Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult, Correspondance, eds. Serge Gut and Jacqueline Bellas [Paris: Fayard, 2001]) that augmented Ollivier’s collection, corrected numerous errors in his edition, and drew on seventy years of scholarship surrounding Liszt, d’Agoult, and their variegated world. Consequently, the Gut/Bellas edition has become the definitive document on the couple, as well as an indispensable source for students of Liszt’s early and virtuoso years.

Michael Short’s edition of the Liszt/d’Agoult correspondence brings these letters to English readers for the first time. This material is not easy to read, even in the original French, as it includes numerous asides, insider and oblique references, and original-language citations—often quoted incorrectly—in English, Italian, and German. Yet, as translator, Short is more than up to the challenge: he has already edited and translated a large collection of Liszt’s letters (Franz Liszt, Liszt Letters in the Library of Congress, ed. and trans. Michael Short [Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2002]); and for the Liszt/d’Agoult correspondence, he was able to work closely with Gut while preparing his English readings. While Short’s edition is, as its title page indicates, “Abridged from and based on the critical edition” of Gut and Bellas, the organization of his edition follows that of its source only to a point. The French edition features an extended, multi-sectioned introduction authored by Gut, the complete correspondence chronologically arranged and grouped into fourteen chapters, eight contextual documents, and several indexes. Each chapter is preceded by a biographical summary and a detailed chronological overview of Liszt’s and d’Agoult’s activities during the period. Each letter is then treated as a stand-alone document, with reference given at the end of the letter’s text to any earlier edition in which it might have appeared, its current whereabouts (if applicable), and commentary via footnotes that restart with the next letter.

Short, on the other hand, provides only a brief overview of the couple’s life together in a succinct, new preface (pp. vii–ix) before launching into the letters. Names, compositions, and other authored products follow in a single index. Short partially dispenses with the chapter divisions in Gut/Bellas, in that he omits chapter numbers, introductions, and chronologies, but compensates by continuously numbering footnotes until a chapter in Gut/Bellas ends. For example, the footnotes in letters 45–85 of Short’s edition run to 220 before resetting with the next letter, and these forty-one letters correspond to Gut’s and Bellas’s second chapter, which covers the period from May 1834 to June 1835—a period notable for the heavy influence of the Abbé Felicité de Lamennais on Liszt, the young composer’s earliest published essays, and the experimental piano pieces like the single-movement Harmonies poétiques et religieuses.

The differences in organizational strategies perhaps would...