Following
the success of Beloved Clara, another evening of
words and piano music scripted by Lucy Parham.
Throughout his life, Franz Liszt burned the candle
at both ends. A child prodigy who became the greatest
keyboard virtuoso of his time, he was also a prolific
composer, whose output ranged from hundreds of
piano pieces to symphonies, tone poems, songs and
oratorios.
An indefatigable traveller, a friend and supporter
of Berlioz, Schumann, Chopin and Wagner, his life
was crammed full of incident and romance, and he
was drawn to women like a moth to a flame. "A
Heart in Pilgrimage" was how he once described
his romantic life, reflecting also that his choices
with women had often been unwise ones.
Drawn largely from his prolific and colourful
letters and interspersed with some of his most
ecstatic and expressive piano music, Odyssey of
Love is a portrait of his relationship with the
two most important women in his life: the aristocratic
freethinking rebel and mother of his three children,
Marie d'Agoult and the bizarre cigar-smoking intellectual
Princess Carolyne von Sayn Wittgenstein.
Odyssey of Love premièred at the Wigmore
Hall in February 2008 in the London Pianoforte
Series with actors Joanna David and Martin Jarvis.
Other actors have included Rosalind Ayres, Orla
Charlton, Stanley Townsend and Henry Goodman. Recent
and future performances include the Salisbury Playhouse,
Rye Festival, Sao Lourenco Algarve, Beaumaris Festival,
St. George’s Bristol, Chelsea Festival and
Bury St Edmunds Festival, Royal Hall Harrogate,
Lincoln Festival and Sheffield Festival. The US
première took place in December 2008 at
LA Theatreworks, Los Angeles. This will be broadcast
on National Public Radio across the USA this year.
The Cast: