Texts and contexts

The most prominent composers in Germany during the 1850s—Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, and Schumann—all liked to be compared to Byron. 1 Berlioz thought he bore a physical resemblance to the poet and, in his youth, sought connections between their lives: he searched out Byron’s acquaintances while traveling in Italy, read the “burning verse” in a confessional in St. Peter’s, and threatened suicide in melodramatic manner after being rejected by Camille Moke. Both his overture Le corsair and Harold en Italie celebrate the Byronic wanderer, as do the first two books of Liszt’s Années de pèlerinage , written in Switzerland and Italy in the company of Marie d’Agoult. 2 Liszt’s Byronic habit of persuading married women to forsake their husbands was shared by Wagner, whose Dutchman exemplifies the wanderer’s threat to female virtue. 3 Byron was appealing because he was a man of action as well as words, demonstrated not only by his notorious exploits as a lover, but also through his engagement with politics, consummated in what many frame as his “sacrifice” for the Greek cause at Missolonghi. 4