It’s the fall of 1871. A twenty-six-year-old Ukrainian lady sends a cable to Europe to pianist and composer Franz Liszt. She warns him that she is about to cross the ocean to kill him. Ten days later, she exhibits up at his doorstep.

Outrageous because it sounds, this story is definitely true. Right now we’re wanting on the lifetime of pianist and novelist Olga Janina, whose relationship with Liszt practically killed him.

Olga Janina’s Childhood and Marriage

Olga Janina was born Olga Zelińska on 17 Might 1845 in present-day Lviv, Ukraine, the daughter of Ludwik Zieliński and Lopuszanska Sabina. The household was musical: her mom was a pianist, and her older brother was Jarosław Zieliński, a pianist, composer, instructor, and music critic. She started finding out piano along with her mom when she was a bit woman.

Her household was comparatively rich. Her father had made cash inventing and promoting a brand new components of boot polish. The truth is, within the mid-1850s, her household employed a Czech composer named Vilém Blodek to function her non-public tutor.

In 1863, the 12 months she turned 18, she married a nobleman named Karol Janina Piasecki. They’d one daughter, Helene, however the marriage didn’t final lengthy.

She would later write a fictionalized account of her life through which, in revenge for his wedding ceremony evening cruelty, she horsewhipped her husband and left him the next day.

Ultimately, the one factor she saved of her husband was his second identify, which she became her skilled surname.

Assembly Liszt

After her marriage broke down, Janina started ping-ponging round Europe, taking music classes from numerous academics.

In April 1865, she went along with her mom to Paris to review underneath Henri Herz and made her public debut. In 1866, she went again to Lviv to review with a Polish pianist named Karol Mikuli, a Chopin pupil.

Then, fatefully, in 1869, she went to Rome to review with Franz Liszt. She’d heard him play in April in Vienna, and she or he was completely entranced. She arrived in Might. Liszt was shocked when he met her: she’d signed her identify “O. Janina”, and he’d been anticipating a person.

Janina minimize a dashing determine. She smoked cigars, wore males’s garments, carried a dagger with a poisoned tip, wielded a revolver, smoked a substantial amount of opium and laudanum, and declared (falsely) that she was a Cossack countess. She approached her music-making with unnerving depth: she was recognized for biting her nails down to date that she left blood on keyboards.

German historian Ferdinand Gregorovius reported of her in October 1869 that she was “a bit, witty, silly particular person, mad about Liszt.”

Franz Liszt: Mosonyis Grabgeleit, S.194

Liszt’s Mosonyis Grabgeleit, S.194, from 1870, across the time he was educating Janina.

A Love Affair with Liszt?

It’s attainable that Liszt and Janina launched into some form of romantic relationship throughout this time. Years later, in a fictionalized account, she claimed that he instructed her, “I can resist you not!” and that they went to mattress collectively. It’s unclear whether or not this fictionalized model of their relationship had any fact to it.

Regardless of her eccentricities, or perhaps due to them, Liszt was impressed by her expertise.

In 1870, he invited her to carry out on the Weimar Pageant in Weimar. She labored as a copyist for him, and he inspired her to study his piano concertos.

Yuja Wang: Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat main, S.124

A Break within the Liszt Relationship

Through the winter of 1870-71, Liszt invited Janina to stay in his entourage whereas he spent the winter within the metropolis of Pest.

Whereas there, she had a horrifying reminiscence lapse that may show consequential to her relationship with Liszt.

Hungarian authoress Janka Wohl described the scene at a personal live performance:

When her flip got here she was very graciously acquired, and she or he commenced her [Chopin] Ballade, after all enjoying by coronary heart. All went nicely till the sixth web page, when she hesitates and will get confused. In desperation she begins once more, inspired by indulgent applause. However, at the exact same passage, her overwrought nerves betray her once more. Pale as a sheet she rises. Then the grasp, totally irritated, stamps his foot, and calls out from the place he’s sitting: “Cease the place you’re!” She sits down once more, and, within the midst of a sickening silence, she begins the wretched piece for the third time. Once more her obstinate reminiscence deserts her. She makes a determined effort to recollect the ultimate passages, and finally finishes the deadly piece with a clatter of terrible discords.

I used to be by no means current at a extra painful scene. Going out, the grasp upbraided her greater than angrily, as she clung to his arm. He had been severely tried, and he finally misplaced all persistence with the freaks of his pupil. And, this breakdown confirming because it did, his oft-expressed opinion that she was not of the stuff that artists are manufactured from, he not spared her.

Within the spring of 1871, Liszt confided in a letter to his associate, writer Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, that the novel concepts of George Sand “[seem] faint and timid to [Janina]” and that she had tried suicide a number of occasions. Nevertheless, he begged Carolyne to not share a phrase of his pupil’s troubles.

Plotting Her Revenge

Round this time, Janina’s father died, creating new monetary and emotional pressures.

After an ill-fated playing journey to Baden-Baden along with her brother, she crisscrossed the world, making an attempt to determine herself as a live performance pianist. She began out by touring Russia after which shifting to America.

Liszt had inspired her to maneuver abroad. He entrusted her with the three-volume manuscript of his Technical Research to deliver to a writer named Julius Schuberth. The request made a specific amount of sense, as he’d trusted her to work on a good copy again in Rome. Schuberth had promised to present her $1000 for the manuscript, the tough equal of $25,000 immediately. Sadly, one way or the other, she misplaced the manuscript and saved the thousand {dollars}.

Franz Liszt: Technical Research, S.146 (Schuberth’s version)

A contemporary MIDI transcription of Liszt’s Technical Research.

Making an attempt to Homicide Liszt

On 15 October 1871, she cabled Liszt that she was coming again to Europe to kill him. Ten days later, she adopted by means of, exhibiting up at his door along with her well-known revolver and a wide range of harmful medication.

Liszt spent hours speaking to her, and later, two of his pals joined, too. She insisted that the one object she had in life was to homicide Liszt after which die by suicide.

Liszt thought of contacting the police throughout the disaster, however he felt that they wouldn’t get there in time to make a distinction.

She ended their dialogue by taking poison and going into convulsions. Liszt returned her to her lodge, and a health care provider was referred to as. Seems, the poison hadn’t been poison in any respect, and she or he presumably was faking her response.

Liszt’s pals relayed agency situations: she was to go away Budapest instantly or be prosecuted.

The occasion shook Liszt up badly. He defined the scenario in obscure phrases in a letter to Carolyne, and wrote, “I want to neglect this episode as quickly as attainable which, because of my guardian angel, didn’t finish in disaster or in a public scandal.”

Plotting Extra Revenge…With Steamy Novels

Janina then took her weapons and her medication and moved to Paris, the place she carried out Liszt’s works and gave lectures about him. She additionally started to jot down fiction.

In 1874, she printed a novel underneath the pseudonym Robert Franz. (She had clearly chosen the identify to insult a Liszt good friend and confidant, composer Robert Franz Julius Knauth.) She titled her novel Recollections of a Cossack.

The guide is a couple of composer/abbot named Abbot X and his steamy love affair with a pupil. It was a thinly veiled reference to Liszt, who had turn into an abbé in 1865.

The identical 12 months, she wrote one other novel from the attitude of what she imagined Liszt’s response to her first guide could be. She printed it anonymously and referred to as that one Recollections of a Pianist.

Two novels nonetheless, weren’t sufficient. So she created the persona of Sylvia Zorelli, purportedly a good friend of the protagonist of the primary two books, and wrote two extra novels from Sylvia’s perspective: The Loves of a Cossack, by a good friend of Abbot “X”, and The Romance of the Pianist and the Cossack.

She returned to her Robert Franz persona in 1876 to jot down Letters from an Eccentric.

Within the course of, Janina created an entire backstory for her fictional self. One of the vital surprising tales was that she owned a tiger in Ukraine and that the Kiev Conservatory needed to shut down after it attacked one of many college’s leaders. Readers understood that components of her story have been true and different components fabricated, but it surely was by no means clear which have been what.

She capped her novel-writing profession off by sending copies of the books to Liszt’s well-known pals…and the pope.

What Was Liszt’s Response?

So how lots of the occasions in these novels truly occurred? Historians aren’t certain, so it looks like we’ll must be content material not realizing.

What did Liszt consider Janina? There should have been one thing exceptional about her, as a result of regardless of her ferocious one-woman PR marketing campaign in opposition to him, he by no means blamed her for her habits, feeling that she didn’t have full management over herself. “And in my view, she was proficient,” he mentioned.

Olga Janina’s Later Life

In 1881, Janina married author Paul Cézano. She created a house base within the city of Lancy, Switzerland, and thru the early Eighteen Eighties, traveled Europe giving performances. She remade her identification but once more, performing now as Russian pianist Olga Lvovna Cézano.

In 1886, she co-founded the Geneva Music Academy in Geneva, Switzerland. She solely caught round for a 12 months, founding a Larger College of Piano and Concord quickly afterward.

Cézano died in 1887. She remarried a professor and gynecologist named François Vulliet.

She saved performing even after her marriages, and scattered opinions of her appearances have survived. In London, a critic referred to as her “a performer of common caliber at finest, though rumored to have a powerful repute on the Continent.” Evaluations have been extra optimistic in Paris in 1894, the place she gave a live performance of Brahms’s works a number of years earlier than he died.

Her third husband Vulliet died in 1896. She moved to the south of France for some time earlier than returning to Paris, the place she died on 13 July 1914, a number of weeks earlier than the beginning of World Warfare I. True to chaotic kind, she had embraced one final pseudonym: the one-word “Nikto.”

Janina’s Legacy

Olga Janina has been largely forgotten by music lovers. When she’s remembered, it’s normally as being an eccentric, mentally unstable harlot.

However there’s a component of sexism at play there. Hector Berlioz, as an illustration, got here up with a murder-suicide plot similar to Janina’s, coming near killing his pianist fiancée for marrying one other man, and but we nonetheless take heed to his Symphonie Fantastique commonly. Certainly, we even have fun it.

One factor is evident: regardless of no matter psychological well being troubles she struggled with, Olga Janina was somebody who Liszt (at one level, no less than) valued and admired and perhaps even beloved. Her story is price remembering.

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