Introduction

In the summer of 1886, Franz Liszt, pianist, composer, and teacher, traveled to Bayreuth to attend his granddaughter’s wedding. Having reached his seven- ties, Liszt’s health and patience were not what they had once been, and long distance travel was increasingly onerous for him. For this reason, Liszt hadn’t planned on attending the Bayreuth Festival. Yet when he heard of the wedding, and his daughter, Cosima Wagner, insisted his presence would lend important support to the Festival, he agreed to attend. After enjoying the wedding and a performance of Richard Wagner’s music drama Parsifal, a piece Liszt loved, he fell ill with pneumonia and died in misery on 31 July. Liszt’s funeral took place on 3 August in the local Catholic church, attended mostly by those present in Bayreuth for the Festival, although some of his piano students and friends also arrived for the ceremony. The chapel was bedecked with Hungarian and German national wreaths of red-white-green and black- red-white.1 The music consisted of chants performed by a handful of priests and an organ improvisation on themes from Parsifal: because his friends and students could not participate in the ceremony, none of his own music was performed. Despite Liszt’s relatively low profile in Bayreuth, throngs of mourners appeared in the streets.2 Masses of onlookers surrounded the area of the grave, as the police had not received orders to keep access to it open. Liszt’s friends and family had to struggle through the crowd to reach the gravesite, where mourners had trampled the grave decorations in their eagerness to participate in Liszt’s commemoration.3 Shortly after the funeral a dispute arose between Liszt’s daughter Cosima Wagner, his long-time companion the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, and various nationalist and religious groups in Germany and Hungary regard- ing the proper location of Liszt’s remains. Cosima Wagner based her decisions about her father’s remains on her desire to preserve both his and her late husband Richard Wagner’s reputations. She wanted him buried in the royal tomb at Weimar, or in Budapest, so long as both legislative houses requested it and Liszt was given national honors. She believed Liszt’s close alliance with the Grand Duke Carl Alexander of Weimar, as his music director for thirteen years, earned him a place alongside Goethe and Schiller and their patron, the Grand

1 C.R., “Am Grabe Liszt’s,” NZfM 82, no. 33 (13 August 1886): 359. All translations mine unless otherwise noted. 2 “Franz Liszt,” PL Beilage (2 August 1886). 3 Kornél Ábranyi, “Franz Liszt,” PL 33, no. 214 (4 August 1886).

Duke Carl August. Carl Alexander offered to build a mausoleum for Liszt at the artist’s former home, the Altenburg, but Wagner rejected that idea as unfitting for her famous father. Sayn-Wittgenstein wanted him to rest in a place of honor, either in Weimar, where she and Liszt had lived together for more than a decade, or in Rome, to be honored as a member of the Church. She endorsed the Franciscans’ claim, who sought to have his body moved to Rome. The Church laid claim to Liszt as he had belonged to the secular Third Order since 1857 and had taken lower orders in 1865, becoming an abbé. Another suggestion sought to commemo- rate Liszt as a Catholic by burying him in Eisenach, near Weimar, at the foot of the Wartburg in the Chapel of St. Elisabeth. Cosima Wagner did not want that kind of commemoration for her father; since divorcing her first husband, Hans von Bülow, to marry Richard Wagner, and converting to Protestantism, her relationship to the Church was strained at best. Representatives from regions of the Habsburg lands where Liszt had lived also forwarded suggestions. Many members of the Hungarian aristocracy and friends to whom Liszt had purportedly expressed a desire to be buried in Hungary supported Budapest as a burial site. Liszt had contributed much to Hungarian music and teaching, exemplified by his Hungarian Rhapsodies and the sizable number of Hungarian professional pianists who had studied with him. In response to a Hungarian citizens’ petition for a burial in Pest, the Hungarian Prime Minister, Kálman Tisza, made a speech in which he accused Liszt of being a disloyal son of his nation because of his book of 1859, Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie, and so Pest became impossible as a burial site, disappointing Cosima Wagner and Liszt’s Hungarian friends.4 Proposals were also made for Liszt’s burial in his birth village of Raiding in western Hungary. All of these suggestions about Liszt’s final burial site signal the importance of commemoration and its function of affixing a final meaning to Liszt’s life; Liszt’s protean allegiances and roles were to be laid to rest.5 The struggle over Liszt’s interment was a skirmish in a much larger con- test over Liszt’s identity during the nineteenth century. Liszt spent important portions of his life in Vienna, Paris, Weimar, Budapest, and Rome. During his performance tours, he played nationalist pieces in the German lands, Russia,

4 Az Országgyűlés Képviselőházának naplója [Parliamentary Session Minutes] (Pest, 1887), 58–59. 5 For works exploring funerals as forms of commemoration, see Volker Ackermann, “Staatsbegräbnisse in Deutschland von Wilhelm I. bis Willy Brandt,” in Nation und Emotion: Deutschland und Frankreich im Vergleich, 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Hannes Siegrist, Jakob Vogel, and Etienne François (Göttingen, 1995), 252–273; Avner Ben-Amos, Funerals, Politics, and Memory in Modern France, 1789–1996 (Oxford, 2000).