lungs

wycherley:

Liszt at the Piano, Josef Danhauser (1840)

Reading from left to right across the elegantly appointed music room of 1840 (Danhauser’s years of designing furniture for his father’s firm served him well in furnishing the Faubourg apartment he visited only in imagination), we encounter Alexandre Dumas père (1802-1870), Victor Hugo (1802-1885), George Sand (1803-1876), and standing in a brotherly clutch. the musical twosome of Paganini and Rossini. Completing the lineup of living Romantics present at this Weihemoment are the “Florentine” profiled Liszt and a floor-ensconced, flaxen-haired Marie d’Agoult seen from the back (thus relieving the conscientious portraitist from having to invent a visage for the only member of the famous ensemble whose physical appearance was unknown to him). Due homage is also paid to prematurely departed but ever-present prototype of Romanticism Lord Byron (1788-1824), whose gift-framed profile, hovering adroitly above that of Liszt’s, gazes away from the bust of the German hero on the piano and towards the statuette of a Gallic heroine on the fat left—Joan of Arc (about whom d’Agoult would later write a play and Liszt two songs). Danhauser has pulled all the stops. And quite appropriately. We can not help but admire his only slightly outdated knowledge of the shifting membership of the Liszt-d’Agoult circle. (Liszt and the countess would themselves be separating permanently in April of 1844.) In 1840, Paganini would have been fifty-seven, Rossini, forty-six. They appear much younger, though by no means idealised, in Danhauser’s depiction.

The changing image of Beethoven: a study in mythmaking, Alessandra Comini (x)