You arrive at this advanced state of consciousness when you really wish to, and are then in a state of bliss. So there is no question of suddenly being flung from one state of consciousness to another so totally foreign that the soul would feel ill at ease and out of its element. “There is a sort of soul-sensing, when one soul close to another recognises it by sensing its presence, and can identify the individual’s atmosphere. With her, he discussed spiritual matters, and said: Rosemary wrote a book Unfinished Symphonies, in which she records her conversations and encounters with Liszt, Chopin and others. Though she had only had a few very basic piano lessons, Liszt taught her to play his music. They worked with a housewife, Rosemary Brown, who had a hard time with her health, and making ends meet but Liszt had befriended her since she was a small child. It was an experiment, and it made a relatively brief commotion in the BBC at that time. They also – with vision of the internet to come – had a quantity of new music to download. In the 1960s, on the Inner Plane, Liszt led a group of other composers – including Berlioz, Chopin, Beethoven and Brahms – and a few scientists, to demonstrate to our materialistic mindset, that there IS more to things than meets the eye, and to set us a-wondering. What does he teach me? Be true to the generous spirit, even when it breaks the casket I love the daemon whose great wings he spread, and his stubborn benevolence and peccadilloes. At difficult times in life, his music spoke solace, and for months on end it would fill my soul with his understanding: the Cypresses and Sunt Lacrimae rerum. He came to me first when I was pregnant: his oratorio Christus cradled me. My meditation with Franz Liszt is beauty and a deep transmutation of grief: the De Profondis and his psalm of Jerusalem. His influence on Wagner’s melodic material was self-effacing the Tristan phrase with its inward key-changes, was received and written first by Liszt in The Bells of Strasbourg Cathedral. His generosity was beloved, but also mocked, for its largesse spread beyond conventional capacity and embarrassed the narrow minded. When he was embodied, he suffered much misunderstanding, particularly between his religious and mystic natures – they were poles apart, drawing together. The portrait of him in blue, is because I dreamed I painted him like this, and saw it hanging in a room, in a gold frame. More than a century later, it stands, it lives and finds receptive ears he was a prophet. Liszt’s progressive pulse and dissonance is NOW. The pulse stands still, like Dante’s white rose. Liszt was the first living “recording instrument”, as he travelled tirelessly – a diplomatic prince among the countries, a flamboyant gypsy whose cembalum thrills slowed down and transformed, as he aged, into single phrases mandala beyond the time. The genius of our times is its ability to catalogue. Only a fraction of his output is played in concert halls today yet thanks to the passion of dedicated archivist Leslie Howard and others, Liszt’s real music – the hidden part of the iceberg – is available in abundance on CD: from sketches on restaurant serviettes, to choral works, psalms, threnodies and the meditations of his old age – it is all recorded it is all being heard. Nuages Gris, Unstern, Bagatelle without Tonality and the Gondolas are unadorned cosmic statements, questions of the universe and of God, left open. Liszt believed no one wanted to hear his later music it was written for an audience a century or two ahead of his time. The young Liszt on tour, to support Nelida and his children In his youth, Franz Liszt was the first “rock star” – and a human recording-engineer! So profound was his self-communion through the Magyar dallok, that his transcriptions also, are works of deep integrity, with nothing standing in the way of the composer. They would not otherwise have reached European audiences, and might not even be known today. He transcribed volumes of Beethoven, Bach, Schubert and Italian opera to the piano. He rode all over Europe like an angel, introducing music to itself. His later and lesser known music pierced me to the quick. Liszt is another gallery and chapter to only touch on here.

Franz liszt images