#music, #poem, «Lisztomania»

Liszt fever! This is how they described the madness of his followers, and how they related to Liszt during his performances. Does «Beatlemania» sound familiar? Well, the mania started back in the XIXth Century with this phenomenal pianist, Franz Liszt. The fist time this mania occurred was during a concert he gave in Berlin (1841). Then a few years later (1844) Heinrich Heine* coined the phrase after analysing Liszt’s concert season in Paris. Lisztomania was characterised by the intense levels of histeria demonstrated by his followers.

MANIA + MUSIC = MUSICMANIA

Music is a blissful angel that flies through particles of air

on tiny beads of sweat,

and rests upon the echoes of your laughter,

or upon the blinking of your large green eyes.

Music roars in harmony with the loudest thunder,

keeps rhythm with the tiny drops of rain,

that accumulate on rooftops,

discordant with uncontrolled

wild movements…

Music stares but does not look,

and bends until you break.

Breathing starts and breathing stops,

while blood,

that rushes madly to the brain,

contemplates sanity but quickly gives up

as I throw logic out the window

with the white keys of my piano

and the E string of my

Fender bass.

C.2024, Francisco Bravo Cabrera, 23 JUL 2024, Izmir, Turkey

* Christian Johann Heinrich Heine, one of the most famous and recognised German poet and essayist of the XIXth Century. He is considered the last of the poets of Romanticism, and the poet who ended the style. He would conjure up the full spectrum of romanticism only to destroy it.