Sound System: The Political Power of Music by Randall Dave

Author:Randall, Dave [Randall, Dave]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Sociology, Politics, History
ISBN: 9780745399300
Goodreads: 34696144
Publisher: Pluto Press
Published: 2017-03-20T00:00:00+00:00

F. Liszt

By the way, he must have earned at least 10,000 talers here, and his hotel bill amounted to 3,000 talers – apart from what he spent in taverns. I tell you, he’s a real man. He drinks twenty cups of coffee a day, two ounces of coffee every cup, and ten bottles of champagne, from which it can fairly safely be concluded that he lives in a kind of perpetual drunken haze . . . He has now gone off to Russia, and one wonders whether the ladies there will also go as crazy.3

It’s telling that Liszt snubbed the adoring bourgeois women, preferring to get drunk with students. It reminds us that although rulers like to bask in the reflected glory of stars, stars don’t always want to indulge them. Sometimes that’s because they don’t agree with what the rulers are doing or what they represent. Sure enough, Liszt’s choice of drinking buddies was made against the backdrop of a growing mood of disappointment with the new society. Many poor people forced off the land by ‘enclosure acts’ had to make their way to cities to find waged work in huge new mills and factories. Conditions were appalling – the English poet William Blake echoed the views of millions when he famously described the mills as ‘dark and satanic’ in a poem first published in 1808. It may have been Paganini who made a pact with the devil, but it was the new industrialists in the audience who presided over the hellish. Perhaps Liszt’s prolific champagne intake can best be understood as his attempt to avoid one of the worst hangovers in history . . . In the harsh light of the morning after the bourgeois revolutions, people were waking up to the grim realities of capitalism. As the Austrian writer Ernst Fischer described:

The sincere humanist artist was bound to feel a profound disillusionment when faced with the thoroughly prosaic, thoroughly sobering, yet disquieting results of the bourgeois-democratic revolution . . . [He] could no longer affirm such a world. He could no longer believe with a clear conscience that the victory of the bourgeoisie meant the triumph of humanity.4

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