Franz Liszt and the Lady of the Camellias
Famous Lover of Famous Courtesan, Marie Duplessis
Jul 14, 2009
When Marie Duplessis met Franz Liszt in 1845, the Hungarian pianist was at the peak of his fame. On European tour since 1839, he had already become a celebrity much sought after by many a concert hall and aristocratic salon. It was then that Liszt became the lover of one of most famous French courtesans of the time, the woman who inspired Alexandre Dumas’ Lady of the Camellias, Marie Duplessis.
Duplessis meets Liszt
In his preface to Alexandre Dumas’ novel, the literary critic, Jules Janin maintains that it was he who introduced Marie Duplessis to Franz Liszt. It all happened in 1845 in one of the famous theatres of Paris, L’ Ambigu, on the boulevard Saint-Martin, which in 1840s was offering a variety of melodramas, pièces de boulevard and vaudeville shows. It was during the intermission of one of the new plays that the famous lovers met.
However, according to Virginia Rounding the French courtesan first saw the composer and pianist Liszt in a concert at the Théâtre des Italiens on 16 April 1845. He was introduced to her later in November of the same year by “society doctor”, David-Ferdinand Koreff among whose clients were Liszt’s mother, Anna, and his ex-mistress and mother of his three children, Marie d’Agoult.
Koreff was a “society doctor” – “a strange figure... half charlatan, half genius”, according to Marie’s biographer, André Maurois. Despite her luxury lifestyle and handsome earnings, the French courtesan was suffering from tuberculosis. Dr. Koreff, who, it later transpired, was slowly poisoning Duplessis with strychnine, was the one who introduced her to the famous pianist.
Liszt and Duplessis
The fame of these two 19thC celebrities was comparable. Franz Liszt’s performances had generated such excitement among audiences in Europe that Heinrich Heine spoke of “Lisztomania”: audiences were nearly delirious, “women scrambled for souvenirs: broken strings from his piano, shreds of his velvet gloves, locks of his hair, even his cigar butts”, writes Metzner.
Marie Duplessis, on the other hand, was one of the most famous and sought-after French courtesans of her time; her luxury lifestyle notorious, her string of lovers illustrious, her beauty legendary. In the preface of the 1867 Lady of the Camellias play, Dumas describes Marie as “tall, very slim”, with long, black, lustrous hair, “Japanese eyes, very quick and alert, with lips as red as cherries and the most beautiful teeth in the world”.
The Pianist and the Courtesan in Love
Different sources report that Franz Liszt was “the only man Duplessis had ever loved”. In his introduction to Dumas’ La Dame aux camélias, David Coward reports Liszt to have described her as “the most absolute incarnation of Woman who has ever existed”. Marie reportedly became very attached to him and Liszt frequented her home in the boulevard de la Madeleine where he entertained her guests on the piano.
However, their affair was interrupted in February 1846, only three months after they first met. Marie Duplessis went off to England where on February 1846 she married Count Edouard de Perrégaux at the Kensington Registry Office in London. The reason for the marriage is unclear but the couple separated soon after and Marie returned to Paris and to Liszt. She was already gravely ill.
Death of the Lady of the Camellias
“I shall not live”, Duplessis told Liszt, “I shan’t be able to hold on to this life... Take me anywhere you like; I shan’t bother you. I sleep all day; in the evening you can let me go to the theatre; and at night you can do with me what you will” (Rounding).
Taking pity on the ailing courtesan to whom he had become “strangely attracted”, Liszt promised her before he left Paris in the spring of 1846 to take her to Constantinople in the autumn. He never returned. He was gripped by the “veritable frenzy” around his person, the Lisztomania “which has no equal in the history of madness”.
Marie Duplessis on the other hand was in the grips of death: no amount of fumigations, asses’ milk and rest on horse-hair mattresses, prescribed by her four physicians could improve her condition. One last time she appeared at the theatre in December 1846 or January 1847 “the shadow of a woman... white and diaphanous”. She died on 3 February 1847 from tuberculosis, aged 23.
“And now she is dead”, wrote Liszt simply in 1847. “I do not know what strange chord of elegy vibrates in my heart in memory of her”.
Sources:
Virginia Rounding, Grandes Horizontales, Bloomsbury: London, 2003.
Alan Walker, Franz Liszt: The Virtuoso Years, 1811-47, Cornell University Press, 1999.
David Coward, Introduction in Alexandre Dumas Fils, La Dame aux Camélias, Oxford World’s Classics, Oxford Paperbacks, 2000.
Paul Metzner, Crescendo of the Virtuoso. Spectacle, Skill and Self-Promotion in Paris during the Age of Revolution, University of California Press: Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1998.
Milton Brener, Opera Offstage: Passion and Politics Behind the Great Operas, Robson Books Ltd, 2003.
 |
 |
