The piano who nearly killed Liszt

It is the drop of 1871. A twenty-six-year-old Russian woman sends a cord to Europe to musician and musician Franz Liszt. He is informed that she is about to go across the sea to destroy him. Ten days later, she shows up at his doorstep.

Ridiculous as it sounds, this story is actually true.Olga Janina, a piano and writer, almost perished in a tragic relationship with Liszt.

Olga Janina’s Childhood and Marriage

Olga Janina was born Olga Zelińska on 17 May 1845 in present-day Lviv, Ukraine, the girl of Ludwik Zieliński and Lopuszanska Sabina. The home was music: her mother was a musician, and her older sibling was Jarosław Zieliński, a piano, musician, teacher, and songs critic. When she was a young child, she and her mother started studying the piano.

Her home was somewhat rich. Her parents had succeeded by developing and selling a new shoe polish method. In fact, in the mid-1850s, her community hired a Bohemian artist named Vilém Blodek to function as her personal tutor.

In 1863, the month she turned 18, she married a gentleman named Karol Janina Piasecki. They had one daughter, Helene, but the marriage did n’t last long.

In retaliation for his wedding day violence, she horsewhipped her father and abandoned him the following morning in a fictionalized accounts of her life.

She ultimately changed her husband’s second name into her expert surname.

Meeting Liszt

After her relationship broke down, Janina began ping-ponging around Europe, taking audio training from several teachers.

She made her public debut in April 1865 by traveling to Paris with her family to analyze under Henri Herz. In 1866, she went up to Lviv to experiment with a Finnish piano named Karol Mikuli, a Chopin pupil.

Finally, fatefully, in 1869, she went to Rome to experiment with Franz Liszt. She’d heard him play in April in Vienna, and she was completely entranced. She arrived in May. Liszt was surprised when he met her: she’d signed her name” O. Janina”, and he’d been expecting a man.

Janina cut a dashing number. She smoked cigars, wore men’s clothes, carried a dagger with a poisoned tip, wielded a revolver, smoked a great deal of opium and laudanum, and declared ( falsely ) that she was a Cossack countess. She used to bite her claws so hard that it left body on the keys that she was known for her unsettling approach to music-making.

German writer Ferdinand Gregorovius reported of her in October 1869 that she was” a small, clever, foolish man, mad about Liszt”.

Franz Liszt: Mosonyis Grabgeleit, S. 194

Liszt’s Mosonyis Grabgeleit, S. 194, from 1870, around the day he was teaching Janina.

A Love Affair with Liszt?

During this period, Liszt and Janina might have had a loving marriage. Years afterwards, in a fictitious account, she claimed that he told her,” I can avoid you no longer”! and that they went to bed up. This fictitious version of their marriage lacked any fact, it was unclear.

Despite her oddities, or maybe because of them, Liszt was impressed by her skills.

In 1870, he invited her to do at the Weimar Festival in Weimar. He encouraged her to know his piano concertos, and she did for him.

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

A Split in the Liszt Marriage

Janina was invited to stay with Liszt’s crew while he spent the winter in Pest during the years 1870-71.

She experienced a terrible memory fall while she was there, which would have a significant impact on her relationship with Liszt.

Janka Wohl, a Hungarian author, described the scene at a secret music:

When her turn came she was very graciously received, and she commenced her]Chopin ] Ballade, of course playing by heart. All went well until the seventh website, when she hesitates and gets confused. In despair she begins repeatedly, encouraged by romantic applause. But, at the very same section, her overwrought nerves betray her once. Pale as a plate she rises. Therefore the king, completely irritated, postcards his feet, and calls out from where he is sitting:” Quit where you are”! She sits down suddenly, and, in the midst of a horrible silence, she begins the miserable part for the next day. Her persistent storage also deserts her. She makes a determined effort to recall the final lines of the piece, which she finally ends with a slew of terrible harmonies.

A more agonizing situation not occurred to me. Going up, the king upbraided her more than violently, as she clung to his shoulder. He had endured extensive testing, and he had finally given up on his pupil’s oddities. And he no longer spared her because of his frequently-stated assertion that she was n’t the type of artist that he was.

In the spring of 1871, Liszt confided in a letter to his partner, author Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, that the radical ideas of George Sand” ]seem ] faint and timid to]Janina]” and that she had attempted suicide several times. Nevertheless, he begged Carolyne never to reveal a syllable of his child’s problems.

Plotting Her Punishment

Around this time, Janina’s parents died, creating innovative financial and emotional pressure.

After an ill-fated playing trip to Baden-Baden with her nephew, she crisscrossed the planet, trying to establish herself as a concert pianist. She moved to America after performing tours in Russia.

Liszt had encouraged her to move abroad. He gave her the three-volume Technical Studies book to publish under the name Julius Schuberth. He had trusted her to work on a good backup of the demand in Rome, so it made sense. Schuberth had promised to give her$ 1000 for the manuscript, the rough equivalent of$ 25, 000 today. However, apparently, she lost the book and kept the thousand dollars.

Franz Liszt: Technical Studies, S. 146 ( Schuberth’s edition )

A current MIDI sequencing of Liszt’s Technical Studies.

Trying to Murder Liszt

She told Liszt that she was returning to Europe to shoot him on October 15, 1871. She followed through, showing up at his entrance ten days later with her well-known revolver and a number of harmful drugs.

Liszt spent days talking to her, and after, two of his friends joined, also. She argued that killing Liszt and finally committing murder were her only options.

Liszt thought about contacting the police during the crisis, but he felt that they would n’t get there in time to make a difference.

She took arsenic and had convulsions as she ended the discussion. Liszt returned her to her lodge, and a doctor was called. Turns out, the venom had n’t been arsenic at all, and she probably was faking her emotion.

Liszt’s buddies relayed strong conditions: she was to keep Budapest quickly or be prosecuted.

The occasion shook Liszt up seriously. In a letter to Carolyne, he explained the situation in hazy words, saying,” I wish to overlook this episode that did not end in disaster or in a public scandal.”

Plotting More Revenge…With Steamy Novels

Janina then moved to Paris, where she performed Liszt’s compositions and gave courses about him, with the aid of her arms and her medications. She even began to write fiction.

Under the surname Robert Franz, she published a book in 1874. ( She had undoubtedly chosen the name to insult composer Robert Franz Julius Knauth, a close friend and confidant of Liszt. ) Her book, Memories of a Cossack, was called that.

Abbot X, a composer/abbot, and his hot romance with a pupil are the subject of the book. It was a thinly veiled allusion to Liszt, who had become an abbé in 1865.

She wrote a second text the same year, from the standpoint of Liszt’s anticipated revision of the first book. One Memories of a Pianist, which she published in an unidentified manner, was the title of it.

Two writings however, were not enough. So she created the image of Sylvia Zorelli, apparently a colleague of the character of the first two publications, and wrote two more novels from Sylvia’s viewpoint: The Loves of a Cossack, by a companion of Abbot” X”, and The Romance of the Pianist and the Cossack.

In 1876, she reverted to her Robert Franz image and began writing Words from an Eccentric.

In the process, Janina created a complete story for her imaginary home. One of the most disturbing reports was that she owned a cat in Ukraine and that the Kiev Conservatory had to close down after it attacked one of the school’s officials. It was never clear what parts of her story were real and what elements were fabricated, despite what the audience knew.

She capped her novel-writing career off by sending copies of the ebooks to Liszt’s famous friends …and the bishop.

What Was Liszt’s Answer?

How many of these activities actually took place in these books? Historians are n’t sure, so it seems like we’ll have to be content not knowing.

What did Liszt believe of Janina? She must have had something special going for her, because despite his vicious one-woman PR campaign against him, he always held her accountable for her actions, believing in her lack of self-control. ” And in my opinion, she was talented”, he said.

Olga Janina’s After Living

In 1881, Janina married author Paul Cézano. She created a home base in the village of Lancy, Switzerland, and through the first 1880s, traveled Europe giving shows. She resurrected herself once more, playing the role of Russian piano Olga Lvovna Cézano.

In 1886, she co-founded the Geneva Music Academy in Geneva, Switzerland. She simply remained there for a year before founding the Higher School of Piano and Harmony.

Cézano died in 1887. François Vulliet, a teacher and urologist, was the woman’s spouse.

She kept performing perhaps after her marriages, and spread testimonials of her performances have survived. A writer characterized her as” an average performer at best, although she is rumored to have a solid reputation on the continent.” In Paris in 1894, where she performed Brahms ‘ compositions a few years before he passed away, reviews were more positive.

In 1896, Vulliet, her second husband, passed away. Before making her way back to Paris, she moved to the south of France for a while before passing away on July 13, 1914, just before World War One was officially launched. True to disorganized kind, she had embraced one final moniker: the one-word” Nikto”.

Janina’s Reputation

Music fans have generally forgotten Olga Janina. When she’s remembered, it’s generally as being an eccentric, emotionally unstable harlot.

But there’s an aspect of sexism at enjoy it. Hector Berlioz, for example, came up with a murder-suicide tale very similar to Janina’s, coming close to killing his piano fiancée for marrying another gentleman, and yet we still talk to his Composer Fantastique often. However, we also celebrate it.

One thing is clear: despite whatever mental health troubles she struggled with,Olga Janina was someone who Liszt (at one point, at least) valued and admired and maybe even loved. Her story is worth remembering.

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