LAST THOUGHTS.('The Death of Franz Liszt')(Book Review)

"The Death of Franz Liszt,"a new book by Alan Walker, belongs to the curious subgenre of books about the deaths of composers. In truth, I know of only two others, but each is a macabre little classic. One is Alexander Poznansky's sober-minded "Tchaikovsky's Last Days,"which shows that the composer of the "Pathetique"did not commit suicide at the behest of a homophobic cabal of law-school alumni, as some have claimed, but died horribly of cholera, as his doctors said he did. The other is Hans Moldenhauer's melodramatic "The Death of Anton Webern,"which describes the accidental killing of the most esoteric of twelve-tone composers. It happened in 1945, during the American occupation of western Austria. Webern had stepped outside to enjoy a cigar and was on his way in when he collided with a jumpy G.I., who summarily shot him. The soldier later drank himself to death. The ultimate blame, Moldenhauer says, lies with "strange and inscrutable fate."

Liszt's death was neither mysterious nor violent. He died of a heart attack at the fairly ripe old age of seventy-four. What makes the story of his final illness gripping--inscrutably fateful, even--is that it unfolded against the gothic backdrop of Bayreuth, where his comrade, son-in-law, and sometime nemesis Richard Wagner had forged the "Ring."Wagner died in Venice, in 1883, and was buried in the garden of his Bayreuth home. Liszt died three years later, in the house across the street. It was, Walker suggests, not the place where he would have preferred to breathe his last. Liszt's friendship with Wagner had always been a loaded and lopsided one. "To Bayreuth I am not a composer but a publicity agent,"Liszt once complained. He watched as passages of his own scores magically reappeared in "Tristan"and "Parsifal."He brooded over the aloofness of his daughter Cosima, who, after an internationally shocking adulterous interlude, became Wagner's wife, protector, and alter ego. Still, he venerated Wagner, even at the risk of putting his own staggeringly original music in the shade.

Liszt in his declining years was attended round the clock by Lina Schmalhausen, a fanatical and probably infatuated pupil. Her meticulous record of Liszt's last ten days constitutes the main part of Walker's book. Cosima had asked her father to attend the Bayreuth Festival of 1886 on the ground that it needed his support. He arrived suffering from pneumonia, but Cosima's doctor somehow missed the seriousness of his condition. He dragged himself to "Parsifal"and "Tristan,"suppressing a cough throughout. He repeatedly expressed annoyance that he was falling sick in Bayreuth, of all places--"right under the noses of those people,"he said. Cosima put in appearances at his bedside but was more concerned with overseeing the festival. Schmalhausen had been barred from the premises, but she managed to observe the Master on his deathbed while hiding behind bushes in the garden. Although Cosima insisted that her father's dying word was "Tristan,"the last thing that Lina heard him say was "Please continue sleeping."

I read the grotesque tale of Liszt's death--which ends with a botched embalming and a dispute over ownership of the corpse--on the way to Cincinnati, where the city's long-running May Festival was presenting the world premiere of Liszt's final, unfinished composition: the oratorio "Saint Stanislaus."The score was put together by the musicologist Paul Munson, who located in the Liszt archive in Weimar about an hour's worth of more or less finished music, plus an aria that he orchestrated himself. He sent the score to James Conlon, a conductor with a sharp ear for overlooked works, who placed it on the program of the May Festival.

"Saint Stanislaus,"which Liszt began composing in 1874, is a thrillingly strange piece that sways between the mundane and the arcane, as the composer's later music often does. What happened to this artist in old age is one of the enduring mysteries of musical history: the former showman of the European salons rocketed off into regions that no other nineteenth-century composer, not even Wagner, came near. The journey had much to do ...