Liszt among the Degenerates: On the Vagaries of being a Musical Genius, c. 1890- c. 1935

Abstract

"Pathologically speaking," wrote John Ferguson Nesbit in 1891, "music is as fatal a gift to its possessor as the faculty for poetry or letters; the biographies of all the greatest musicians being a miserable chronicle of the ravages of nerve-disorder."l Nesbit was writing at a time when the idea of genius as a form of degeneracy had risen to a dominant if not uncontested position in both intellectual and popular discourse. The musical genius was often singled out for special attention by "degenerists" such as Nesbit and Cesare Lombroso, with the real or imagined characters and physical flaws of Mozart, Gluck, Beethoven, Schumann, and Wagner receiving frequent mention. Franz Liszt, however, was a rare rather than frequent figure in these works, and the very unstable status of his ascension to genius is revealing in itself. I am convinced that Liszt's reputation in the four or five decades after his death was significantly influenced by dominant views on the nature of genius and degeneracy.