Liszt is indeed a very ambiguous figure. Most brief biographies refer to his
minor orders in the Catholic Church as an Abbé. You need to dig a bit to find
references to his Freemasonry.
His vast output has tended to be eclipsed by others who built on his foundations.
It is the very late works which are more spoken about than performed. Brief,
spare and bleak, works like Unstern, Sinistre, Disastro and the prophetic
Lugubrious Gondola, based on a vision of Wagner's Death in Venice. There
is also a very curious Bagatelle without Tonality, which looks ahead to the
twentieth century.
Rosemary Brown died fairly recently. I seem to recall that in later years she
had been supported by a Canadian Trust? In the UK she was a
largely forgotten figure, though once the subject of television shows in
the late 1960s and early 1970s.
Philips made a big thing of the album they
recorded around 1970 in which her pieces were played by herself and Peter Katin.
She even channelled Donald Tovey to write a sleeve-note! I also have an earlier
semi-private record of her pieces played by Mary Firth.
Her (ghost-written?) book called Unfinished Symphonies reveals a woman of shabby
genteel background reduced to a rôle of school dinner-lady, which she abhored.
She was taken up by spiritualist circles and supported by a trust fund. She fell out
with them when she felt the pressure to produce was interfering with her gift.
There were a number of testimonials from musicians such as Richard Rodney Bennett,
stating that they would have found her pastiches hard to equal. But maybe they
lacked her strong material motivations? It is a curious tale and her more elaborate
scores seem to have been dangled without ever being unveiled to the public. Her
recital audiences were mainly spiritualists and a handful of self-selected and
sympathetic musicians.
Her spiritual "Control" was Liszt, of course, whom she recalled visiting her bedside
as a child to whisper that one day she would do important spiritual work!
All very odd. I relish the pictures on the Philips disc sleeve, which depict her shopping
in a check coat. She looks very much the model for the Monty Python "women"!
Still, it would be interesting to see and hear the long promised Beethoven 10th,
though Dr. Barry Cooper seems to have got in first with his elaboration of the existing
sketches.
