Yuja Wang

Musiq3 - RTBF 

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This Friday, March 20, at 20:00, live on Musiq3 the opening concert of Berwaldhallen with the phenomenal pianist Klarafestival alongside Yuja Wang https://www.rtbf.be/.../vivez-en-direct-le-concert-d...

Why a besotted piano student held Liszt at gunpoint

Terry Blain

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Liszt's disgruntled piano student threatens to kill him

In mid-October 1871, a message was cabled from New York City to Franz Liszt in Europe. In itself, this was nothing unusual. Nearing 60 years old, the Hungarian composer and pianist had long been a globally famous musician, attracting 2,000 letters a year in correspondence. But this new communication was startlingly different. It was from a former pupil of his, the 26-year-old Olga Janina, and her message was brutal: she was returning by steamship to Europe, and she was going to kill him.

Liszt was no stranger to extremes of human behaviour. As a pianist his extraordinary skill and charisma had roused audiences to unprecedented levels of adulation. Women in particular adored him, fainting at his concerts and scrambling to lay hold of his personal possessions in a frenzied hero-worship known as ‘Lisztomania’. But Janina’s ghoulish cable was something else again – an explicit, unmistakable threat of assassination. Could it possibly be serious?   

'She wore a belted dagger with a poisoned tip'

Those around Liszt certainly believed it could. As a pupil of the great pianist, Janina had cut an arresting figure among her fellow students and acolytes. She cut her hair short, smoked cigars, dressed in jacket and trousers, and wore a belted dagger with (allegedly) a poisoned tip on it. Unnervingly, she also carried a revolver and bit her fingernails so aggressively that blood dripped on the keyboard when she played the piano. Unsurprisingly, Janina was viewed as dangerously unstable by her circle of acquaintances, one of whom advised Liszt to be on his guard ‘against the vengeance of a hysterical madwoman’.  

• More Liszt at gunpoint...

A dangerous, passionate obsession... made worse by opium addiction

But what was Janina feeling vengeful about? After all, Liszt had, it seems, done much to further the career of the aspiring young pianist from Lemberg (now Lviv, Ukraine). He taught her, gave her work as a copyist, arranged concert opportunities and made her part of his travelling entourage. Janina’s relationship to Liszt, however, quickly became emotionally obsessive. One observer spoke of her ‘headstrong passion’ for her mentor, another described her as ‘a little, witty, foolish person, mad about Liszt’. 

Janina’s unsteady grip on reality was further weakened by an addiction to opium and other pharmaceutical substances. She began styling herself ‘Countess’ and ‘the Cossack’ – images extravagantly at odds with her solidly bourgeois upbringing (her father’s money came from a patented boot polish). She also made several attempts at suicide, prompted by her father’s death in 1870 and her subsequent struggles with money.

More Liszt at gunpoint...

A humiliating public scolding... and rejection

How did these dangerously swirling energies suddenly fasten on a plan to murder Liszt? One possible factor was a series of memory lapses Janina suffered while playing Chopin’s Ballade in G minor at a prestigious house concert hosted by Liszt in Budapest. Visibly irritated, Liszt stamped his foot and ‘upbraided her more than angrily’. A public scolding by the greatest living pianist left painful scars, and further destabilised Janina’s already precarious mental position.   

By now, Liszt was tiring of Janina’s difficult nature and her socially embarrassing habits. He partly engineered her departure for the US in July 1871 as an attempt to relaunch a professional career that had sputtered only fitfully in Europe. But the trip was fruitless, and Janina was angered by Liszt’s ‘pitiless’ reaction to her failures and frustrations. And so the threatening cable to her erstwhile idol and benefactor was sent. 

More Liszt at gunpoint...

She burst into his apartment, a revolver in one hand and poison in the other

Janina was not long in acting on it. On 25 October 1871, she burst into Liszt’s Budapest apartment, a revolver in one hand and bottles of poison in the other. She had, she said, come to shoot Liszt and then die by suicide. A tense few hours followed, as Liszt attempted to talk Janina down. At one point she swallowed the poison and went into convulsions, but a doctor later confirmed that the ‘poison’ was in fact harmless. The ‘terrible disturbance’, as Liszt termed it, appeared to be over.  

Liszt at gunpoint: the aftermath

It did, though, have an unsavoury afterlife. In 1874, Janina published a purportedly autobiographical novel, in which she none too subtly intimated that her relationship with Liszt had been sexual. There is no reliable evidence that this was true, but the book enjoyed a succès de scandale, in the process causing Liszt considerable upset and embarrassment.    

Janina went on to marry twice more, and died aged 69 in 1914. ‘Of all the crises that Liszt was called upon to endure in his long and chequered life,’ writes Liszt biographer Alan Walker, ‘it is arguable that none caused him more anguish.’ Liszt’s own take on l’affaire Janina was notably more phlegmatic. ‘She was not malicious, merely unbalanced,’ he later commented. ‘And, in my opinion, also talented.’ 

YUJA WANG, ALWAYS

 

In January 2005, the great pianist Rudu Lupu (1945–2022) was absent, for health reasons, from concerts scheduled in the USA and Canada for January and February. Canada's National Arts Centre in Ottawa wrote an article on January 19, 2005, aimed at viewers "for more information":

"Rising star Yuja Wang steps in for pianist Radu Lupu who has been obliged to cancel his Feb. 8-9 NAC Orchestra concerts with Pinchas Zukerman for medical reasons (...) the National Arts Centre is pleased to announce that Lupu will be replaced by rising star Chinese pianist Yuja Wang for these Ovation Series concerts at 20:00 in the NAC’s Southam Hall. (...) Earlier in January, The New York Times wrote: “The Grieg [Piano Concerto] came with another powerful attraction: the remarkable 17-year-old Chinese-born pianist Yuja Wang. Ms. Wang, a student at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, performed with an assurance that belied her age, displaying a clean, sparkling technique and plenty of strength but also a fine sense of rhythmic freedom." 

Charles Ives - his music and his life

 

Born 1874

Died 1954

The devices that Ives introduced into his music – atonality, polytonality, dissonance, multiple rhythms, jazz, collage – were way in advance of the Stravinskys, Schoenbergs and Debussys of this world.

Charles Ives: lonely American giant

'He plunged ahead solely on the basis of his ear, his stamina, his conviction, his talent and his need to create' (John McClure, Gramophone, April 1967)... Read more

Charles Ives left his Concord Sonata for solo piano unfinished for a reason. But what that reason was remains unclear – which, says Philip Clark, presents a challenge to pianists who tackle the work on record... Read more

What an extraordinary man Ives was – and what extraordinary music! One can only sit back and wonder at his stubbornness, the way he expressed his personal vision and refused to be tied to any received wisdom. The devices that he introduced into his music – atonality, polytonality, dissonance, multiple rhythms, jazz, collage – were way in advance of the Stravinskys, Schoenbergs and Debussys of this world. They arrived at their own answers later and their music was widely performed; not so Ives – most of his music was not performed until the 1950s. Only then could it be seen by how much he had been ahead of his time. His stream-of-consciousness technique has been compared with the James Joyce of Ulysses and Finnegans Wake (though Ives anticipated Joyce in this too).

Where did it come from? His father, mostly – a remarkable band-leader who encouraged his son to ‘open his ears’ and listen to the noise made by two military bands playing different marches simultaneously, to note the out-of-tune singing of hymns in church: in other words to accept natural dissonance, not dismiss it. He even encouraged Ives to sing ‘Swanee’ in a different key to the one in which it was being played on the piano. The young Ives began to experiment, writing in a combination of several keys, first as a spoof, then as a serious proposition. No wonder his teacher at Yale was baffled by someone to whom Chopin was ‘soft…with a skirt on’, Mozart was merely ‘effeminate’, Debussy ‘should have sold newspapers for a living’. (He had higher opinions only of Bach, Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms.)

After graduating, Ives, with assured unpredictability, went into insurance. In 1907 he established the firm of Ives and Myrick (afterwards Mutual of New York) and he proved an exceptionally able businessman, for he ended up a millionaire. When, in 1918, he suffered a massive heart attack and was no longer able to work (diabetes added to the complications), he was able to publish at his own expense some of the vast amount of music he had written ‘out of office hours’ and distribute it free to interested parties. Few people were aware of his double life and Ives made no effort to procure performances of his work – he knew he had no hope of commercial success. When his music was performed, he appeared to be indifferent. By 1930 he had all but stopped composing.

He retired to his farm in Connecticut, becoming increasingly reclusive – he never went to concerts and did not have a record player or radio. Gradually, more of his music began to be played (his Third Symphony, written in 1903, won a Pulitzer Prize in 1947) but it was only after his death that his real achievements were recognised and, indeed, he has become something of a cult figure, an example to any composer who feels faint-hearted in following his instincts and developing independent musical thought. ‘Ivesian’ has entered the language to describe a certain kind of music.

Yuja Wang

 

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