Word: agoult
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...independence to the French Revolution. France, which almost completely surrounds the city, annexed it in 1798, but after the fall of Napoleon it finally became the 22nd canton of Switzerland. By then it was just a peaceful backwater. Franz Liszt came here after eloping with the Countess d'Agoult, and he composed a piano piece inspired by the city's church bells. "Happy is he who can stay long by these shores," wrote another aristocratic visitor, Lord Byron...
Fellowe was Hungarian Pianist Franz Liszt. One of the women was the Countess Marie d'Agoult. She had caused quite a scandal by leaving her husband and running away with Liszt after they had wept together over one of those novels by George Sand in which the heroines always prefer passion to domesticity. The Piffoel family was Authoress Sand and her children. Part of the confusion of genders came about because Liszt's brilliant pupil, Hermann Cohen, another of the party, insisted on wearing girl's clothes. Madame Sand insisted on wearing men's clothes. They...
Most laymen think of Liszt as a saintly white-haired old man who crowned a rich musical life by dedicating himself to God. Critic Newman thinks differently, takes sides with Countess Marie d'Agoult who sacrificed a proud position, bore Liszt three children and saw him truly as a superficial showman so dependent on adulation that he could never adjust himself to solitude and concentrated work. Liszt kept his shallow ways even after he turned to the Church. He repented periodically but he reverted always to the spotlight, to flatterers who kissed his hand, cherished his cigar butts, begged...
Although Liszt was at work on some of his best compositions before 1847 most of his time was devoted to piano recitals. Everywhere but in England, which disapproved of Countess d'Agoult, he was an idol. Women wore his portrait on cameos, went wild over him, He was the first, the greatest of pianists. He was making approximately $60,000 a year, owned 60 waistcoats, 360 cravats...
...left Countess d'Agoult and met her successor, the cigar-smoking Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein. Although love affairs continued to play through his life like tarantellas, she remained his nominal mistress until his death. Only a last minute refusal from Rome to grant her a divorce prevented their marriage...