The Second Tour

Abstract

IN 1983 ALAN WALKER PUBLISHED the first part of a monumental triptych in which he intends to depict the whole sweep of Liszt’s career as personality, pianist and composer. The Virtuoso Years, 1811–1847 has already established itself as a triumph of meticulous research and profound understanding of the man and the artist; in it, myths are dismissed and doubts resolved. But there are one or two minor fissures in the edifice when Professor Walker comes to deal with Liszt’s English excursions in 1840–41. Particularly, he states that the first tour, of ‘the south of England’, finished ‘at Bath’, having made its way ‘along the south coast through Brighton’; this, on the evidence of the previous chapter, is an inaccurate description. Of the second tour he says that the ‘concluding concerts took place in Glasgow and Edinburgh’:¹ this, too, is incorrect, as a glance at the top of this page will confirm. The detailed source for determining Liszt’s itineraries, in England, Ireland and Scotland, exists in the diaries of John Orlando Parry, from which Walker quotes at some length. Parry’s account of the second tour is, moreover, much more lavish and humorous than his shorthand record of the first one.

Reading — Oxf0rd — Leamington — Birmingham Wolverhampton — Newcastle-under-Lyme — Chester Liverpool — Preston — Rochdale — Manchester Huddersfield — Doncaster — Sheffield — Wakefield Leeds — Hull — York — Manchester — Dublin Cork — Clonmel — Limerick — Dublin — Belfast Edinburgh — Glasgow — Newcastle Sunderland — Richmond — Bradford