On his recital tour of Britain in the early 1840s, that same historic tour when in London he first coined the term ‘recitals’ for his public performances, Liszt made a detour to visit Lord Byron’s ancestral home, Newstead Abbey near Nottingham. His response, in letters to his lover Marie d’Agoult, was ecstatic. Byron had died some 25 years earlier, and throughout Europe his influence had remained colossal – for writers and opinion formers, for aspiring poets and painters, for general readers and not least for those who espoused a radical politics.
Liszt had been reading Byron since his teens. One of the composer’s early biographers, in enumerating the multiple literary influences on his creative imagination, drew attention to ‘the strongest kinship he feels with Lord Byron, the poet, as Liszt himself admits, whom he has embraced, to whom he has abandoned
