Explicit

Olga Janina: “La Cosaque”

Published Mar 30, 2021, 7:00 AM

Olga “Janina,” a protofeminist and Polish pianist, was known for stalking Hungarian composer Franz Liszt. 


Franz’s name may or may not ring a bell, but he was recognized as a musical “rockstar” during the Romantic era. He composed a number of popular classical pieces that are still heard of today (“Hungarian Rhapsody”). 


Sure, fans may have screamed and thrown their undergarments at the composer during his performances back in the day. But from writing “fictional” stories about Liszt, to threatening homocide and suicide, Olga took what is called “Lisztomania” to a whole new level. 

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Welcome to Criminalia, a production of Shonda Land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to another episode of Criminalia. This season, we're exploring the lives and motivations of some of the most notorious stalkers throughout history. I'm Maria Tremarqi and I'm Holly Fry. Today we are going to talk about a woman named Olga Janina, and although she was a pianist herself, Olga is probably best known for her obsession with one of the greatest pianists of all time, Franz List. Before we can really get into olga story, we actually need to talk about List because you need to know about who he was to understand how we get to this Stocking story. List was born in October of eighteen eleven, and he was born in a small town in Hungary, which actually after World War One and became part of Austria. He was a child prodigy, and his father was inspired by the life of another child prodigy, whom you know as wolf Gang Amadeus Mozart. He moved to the family to Vienna, where his son could study with the great composers and pianists of the time, including Mozart's rival Antonio Saltieri. About a year later, the family moved to Paris, where lists father thought there would be more opportunity for his son to play and learn. On March nine of eighteen thirty two, List for the first time saw a performance by violinist Niccolo Paganini. And we know that specific date because this was a magical moment for List, who was about twenty one is years old at the time, and this was the moment that he knew he could and would push himself to become a virtuoso pianist. Between eighteen thirty nine to eighteen forty seven, which puts him between the ages of twenty and thirty six, List did indeed become known as a virtuoso pianist, which means he was a master at his craft. And it's this period that solidified him as the greatest pianist of all time. And we're talking about then and still today. And Liszt was part of the movement known as the Romantic Era. We've talked about this a little before. It fell between eighteen fifteen and nineteen ten, and artists during this time, including composers, were establishing new stylistic and technical standards, and List became a major influence in this movement. His works had a measurable impact not only during the nineteenth century, but also on how classical music has been composed and performed ever since. Some of the other more recognizable names of this era, just to give you some context, are Mendelssohn, Brahms, and Tschaikovsky. During his lifetime, List was considered to be bombastic, both in his art and how he lived his life, And that word bombastic comes up all the time when you're researching him. It's every book. I feel like if you did a list drinking game with bombastic, you would be a train wreck. At the end of each chap, you'd be staying over you can. So he was talented, and he was influential as a composer, a pianist, teacher, conductor. I mean, the list is huge. He was even an author. But perhaps above all of that, he was a talented showman, and he was known to have a larger than life personality. His performances became a combination of skill and flamboyance. So most people probably don't think about classical music and musicians in this way, but List was super famous. If you're wondering just how famous we mean. He inspired something that became known as list Domania. Yes, just like Beatlemania. It was more than a century before the Beatles. Like this really is the first hyper attentive of manic fandom. Right, this is the thing. This is the first time that people went nuts. And his concerts were part of this because they were like nothing that anyone had seen before. Right, So, before List, it was considered to be in bad taste if a musician played a song from memory. There's an anecdote actually that we came across where Chopin, who was actually a very good friend of List, He's quoted saying that playing from memory was arrogant and that doing so would make it appear that you were pretending that the composition you were playing was one of your own. But list List did not rely on sheet music because with the way he played, reading from a page would have been a difficult proposition. But it was also a really good way to cause a big stir. Yeah, Chopin, bless him, was so reserved. I could see where he would be like, frauds, what are you doing? Have another beer? Like I'm playing right, Because he thought that his performances should be more than a recital. By the way, that term recital is something that List coined. It seems kind of in the pejorative, but he really viewed his shows as theatrical events that were more than just the music. And if playing from memory was bad, who then this was the worse. Unlike any other pianist in his day or before him, Liz played his piano in such a way on stage that the audience could see his face while he was playing for them. Oh my god, you know I was reading that. He actually also was the first person to walk from the wings out to sit down on his piano, and that too was scandal Like. I will say this, if you've looked at historical portraits of List, particularly in his younger years, you would want to look at that face as much as possible. He was incredibly beautiful. Yes, and the long locks in any way, we'll get going. We're just gonna wax rhapsodic about the handsomeness of Franz. I'm pretty sure I would have been a groupie myself. Um So, in addition to facing the audience when he played for them, he was also very physical when he played the piano, and like I said, he had long walks, and his long hair would often become slick with sweat, and he'd whip it around as he played, and I kind of like to think that it was kind of early headbanging that was going on behind the piano. It would be accurate to say that. List Ultimately, he just captivated his audience. So women swooned and they screamed, and allegedly they threw their nineteenth century under garments at him during his performance, although that had to be kind of a a bit to get off, right. That's a tricky proposition. If you've never worn pantlets and a sit over it, you know they don't just like, it's not an easy undressing situation. That's not just coming through your sleeve like you know, um okay. So, for example, one woman who was sort of skulking around him and she ended up pouring the remaining tea from his teacup into her scent bottle, which was popular at the time. He carried with you. It wasn't something weird, and just like more modern artists on the celebrity level of say like a Mick Jagger or a David Bowie, there were stories of women not just throwing their clothing onto the stage, but also stealing things from him, like that tea and his teacup, or you know, slightly chopping locks of his hair off so he wouldn't notice, or taking just whatever they could get their hands on from him. Yeah, I I feel like I have read accounts where even things like cigarette butts that he had touched they would take yep, and like in their cleavage and like, because yeah, I read the same thing. It was obsessive mania, for sure. They screamed and swooned. And it might not surprise you that among all of the things he was, including all of those very productive and artistic accomplishments, he was also really polarizing. Yeah, a little bit scooch. His friend German composer Ludwig von Beethoven called him, and we're quoting young Turk, because of the rebellious and revolutionary way that he had about him. Clara Schumann, who is regarded as one of the most distinguished pianists of the Romantic era, dismissed him as and this is a great quote that we both love, the smasher of pianos. And that is a great quote because he actually was a smatcher of pianos. His aggressive playing style came to be known as and I'm gonna quote this musical combat. So imagine you're watching him facing you from the stage, and this is going on, and it looked like he was attacking his instrument when he played, and he would often break the strings of pianos and damage the keys. As an interesting aside, pianos were actually a little bit more delicate than than they are today, but it's not like they were made out of cardboard piano. But you can also thank his performances for being the inspiration for manufacturers to improve and FOURTI five piano construction. And there is an account about his playing style that was relayed after someone had witnessed a performance he gave in Vienna. So imagine you have a ticket to see the amazing fronts list, and you enter the theater and you find your seat, and as you settle in, you notice that on stage there are three pianos. Will there be guest artists? You might wonder m guests, but not so much. Liszt would use all three pianos, playing one after the other, as he broke each of the first two with his dynamic and very passionate technique. In a letter to one of his mistresses, he wrote a out that show and he wrote, quote, my concert has just finished. Enthusiasm impossible to describe. That night he received eighteen curtain calls, and then he was ultimately carried out of the theater by his adoring fans. Eighteen curtain goals. That that concert go on to like four in the morning, like you know, right, So no one had seen anything like this before, and the ever growing hysteria that surrounded List became known, as we mentioned earlier, as listomania. So besides destroying pianos that we really can't be sure if he also vandalized hotel rooms, as one might do today. There's never any mention of it. I believe he was polite to hotel I believe he was too. I did see that he was polite to people who he rode with as well in carriages. I think it was just the pianos that he took it all out on. We are going to take a quick break here, but when we come back, we are going to start talking about the groupies that all of this bombastic playing attracted. Welcome back to Criminaliot. So let's talk now about nineteen century rock stars and their groupies. So there were ways in which Frant's list lived up to the rock star image. Even then, he was a bit of a playboy and he had numerous liaisons with women. He never married, but he did come close once. Of his many affairs, there are two women that stood out in his life, Marie Dagou and the Princess Caroline designed Wittgenstein. Liszt and Marie were together for about a decade. They actually had three children together, and when that relationship ended, Marie decided to publish a then scandalous novel under the male pseudonym Daniel Stern. So this is one of those instances where it was fiction on a technicality, was very thinly veiled fiction. It was real, but the names were changed to right barely um. And then there was Caroline and listed in Caroline were actually supposed to be married, but that ceremony was called off on the eve of the wedding because Caroline, who had been married previously, discovered that her first marriage was still legally standing, at least in the eyes of the church, which meant they could not become with the next day. So enter Olga Olga Janina was a cigar smoking feminist, although if we're being period correct, which we should be, she was a proto feminist. This was the time when the ground worked for feminism as we know it today was just beginning to form. She stood out for a couple of reasons, but they're really just two big ones. Um. She preferred to wear a jacket and trousers at a time when women didn't wear trousers, and also for her bizarre behavior. Olga had been notoriously unstable during the time in her life when she lived in Budapest and now living in Paris, the time that her life intersects would List, she had picked up a reputation for being we quote rowdy. She was very jealous of other women, and she was very aggressive. So we actually have a good example of rowdy and aggressive. I think, Um, if we go a little bit deeper into the kind of person Olga was, if we take away her passion for list and just talk about her, this is a pretty telling example. So when an upcoming recital of hers was not promoted in local papers or didn't receive the glowing reviews she had expected, she was not above taking matters into her own hands. And there's one anecdote that has her dressing as a man with a cane and visiting one of the newspaper editors who did not promote her, and she berated him while striking him in the face and chest with that cane. Aggressive I'm gonna take us down a little side street about her mode of dress because her clothing choices were actually not entirely unprecedented at this time. So George Song, who we have name checked on this show before and who was actually a very good friend of Lists. She was with Chopin for many years, so they had a friendship together. She famously wore men's were during this period, and this was, as we said, this sort of period of proto feminism, and donning those garments was actually an act of protests because it was, if you can imagine, now, illegal in Paris for women to wear pants without a permit. Those permits were given to people whose jobs necessitated these so called unladylike garments, or to people who could offer up some health reason that they needed to wear them. Incidentally, that law was on the books in Paris until so let's just let our minds be blown for a moment away pause. Paris Seat of Fashion where it was illegal to wear your jeans until technically, but the point here is that in walking down the street in pants to assault demand with a cane Olga, Janina was breaking multiple laws and she knew it that. Yeah, I think like, oh, I didn't know I wasn't allowed to wear pants, right. Um. So we mentioned earlier that she was also a pianist, and she became one of the students when she was about twenty four years old. But she set herself apart from his other students though. She wasn't quiet about the fact that she kept a revolver in her handbag, and the other students were, and I don't really blame them, they were kind of afraid of her when she showed up to class. Um. I mean I took piano lessons when I was younger, and if someone had showed up and said, hey, have you been practicing the sonata? By the way, I have a gun, I would be like, I'll play Hungarian Rhapsody faster. I'm sorry. But it wasn't even just the revolver. It was believed that she also carried a dagger, and that's a dagger with a poisoned tip. Some sources also suggest that Olga wasn't opium users, So this is a whole combination of things that really are wow um which actually the opium use wouldn't have been all that weird at the time. Um. She also carried around a small bag containing her stash of narcotics, and it said that there was also poisons in it. And for any of those who listened to the first season of Criminaliat, sorry but there's no word on whether or not that was arsenic in the bag. It's always about it's always arsenic. I'm assuming it was probably. Olga Janina was also one of the women who swooned over List, and by swooned we mean threatened his in her own life over an affair that the pair actually had in eighteen seventy. Olga just found herself madly infatuated with him and consequently madly jealous. She followed the women that she considered to be her rivals for his affection, and then she just started following Lists. Um. So in the summer of eighteen seventy one, after their affair was over, List encouraged Olga to travel to New York to give piano performances, which I mean at the very least would give him a break from her continuing emotional blackmail that had been going on. So Olga did go to New York, but once she arrives, their history kind of loses track of her story. And it's assumed that because List destroyed most of the letters that she sent him, that's why we don't really know. But we do know a little bit about their correspondence from some of Olga's own records and Maria's mentioning correspondence, because we know that she continued to send him letters. And in one letter, she we quote, begs for a few gentle words from her beloved, but she did not get them. Liz replied, not what she was hoping, and again we're quoting here. The violence of your feelings disturbs my peace of mind. Permit me therefore to inform you that I shall decline to accept any more of your strange ravings, at least until such time that you understand that no one who fails to observe God's laws can ever hope to find happiness. You also need to reconcile your fate, which is the product, moreover, of your various acts of imprudence. So that's a pretty serious burn Smarting from that, Olga plotted revenge on her once beloved List, and when she returned from New York in late one, she threatened to kill him upon her arrival, and she wasn't really shy about telling people what her plan was, and it was her wife's ambition was to kill List and then commit suicide. And a few sources do report that she did swallow poison, and when a doctor was called to help her, it turned out that she hadn't actually swallowed anything that was dangerous at all. Oh, we are going to take another quick break and have a word from a sponsor, and when we return, we're going to talk about Olga's books, and there will also be a little mention of the who's Roger Daltery and how he is connected to any of The story just keeps getting stranger and stranger. Welcome back to Criminalia. Let's now get into the kinds of things that were in Olga's memoirs. So to be clear, Olga and Liszt were never in a committed relationship. They're a fair lasted much less than a year, but it inspired her to write a lot more than just letters. She wrote her memoirs. In her first book, published in eighteen seventy four, was called Souvenir dun Kosak that translates to Memories of a Cossack. She wrote that under the pseudonym Robert Franz, Now there was a real Robert Franz at the time. He was a German composer, and he was one of Liszt's contemporaries. So this had to have been a little bit awkward, and also how confusing would it have been for him to see his name listed as the author of a kiss and tell book about a barely fictionalized version of one of his friends. This book didn't make the splash that she had really hoped that it would, But the cover art actually sounds pretty great. Um, it was list, but it was a caricature of him playing the piano for half clothed cherubs who were scattering flower pedals at his feet and offering him wine. Upon reading lists. Good for End, whose name actually also was Olga, she was the Baroness von mayan Org wrote to him that she was now going to end have to quote this because her word was much better than anything that I would come up with disinfect her library. So Liszt actually himself when he wrote back, he didn't seem very upset by the book or any of this. But if you recall, this actually wasn't the first scandalous book starring him. He's old hat at this. He's been through this before. It's like whatever in eighteen seventy four, in eighteen seventy five, so remember, let's just this up in years. At this point. Olga went on to write two more books called Leisamuel dun cossack X that's Loves of a Cossack by a Friend of the abbe X and Le Roman du Pianiste aid le Cossack that's the novel of the Pianist and the Cossack, which is very much a reference to him and her. Right, that's really not very well bailed, right, she she self identified as Cossack. That will come up again in a moment. So these books were ones that she also wrote under a pseudonym, but this time it was a different one. It was Sylvia Zarelli, and her books were widely regarded as defamatory. Everyone knew exactly who and what she was referencing, and they were also kind of relegated to being pulp fiction. But she seemed quite proud of it. She sent copies to all of Liszt's friends. Well, it's a nice gift to get. And despite her books being and I'm gonna do this quote end quote business autobiographical, it was about this time when Olga was outed for a few things, and these things did not include anything about List. So first, her last name was not Janina, it was Zelinska. And I'm not fluid in Polish, so up, my apologies to those of you who are. She had taken the name Dannina from her husband, whom she had abandoned along with her child because of her passion for List. And it also became known at this time that she was not a Cossack, nor was she a countess as she had been telling people. She was actually the daughter of a boot polish maker, and her life, as she told it, was truly a work of fiction that was probably the better work than those horrible novels. Historians are actually still untangling the reality of who Olga was and the life that she led, particularly after lists death, and in the end, with all sorts of damage done, it appears that she retreated and then went on to establish a piano studio in Geneva hopefully less aggressive, maybe without the revolver. I don't know, maybe her teaching style, right, she's really aggressive with her pupils list, so a list. Well. He walked away from everything as well, but in a different way. So around eighteen sixty one or maybe eighteen sixty three. The dates seemed to vary a bit, but those are the two that always pop up. He began living a more solitary life and he moved into a small apartment in a monastery just outside of Rome, and in July of eighteen sixty five he received the four Minor Orders of the Catholic Church, which when you receive these, they make you a low ranking clergyman. It did not make him a priest, but he had considered priesthood when he was a teenager. This career change was a huge surprise to many of his fans and to his peers, and apparently to the Catholic Church too. There's this great quote from a monk referring to him as Mephistopheles in the guise of clergy. This really was I think to contextualize it for modern comparison, right, like think of a rock star who was sort of known to be like think of Jagger going, hey, I decided to become a monk right when he released straight Yeah. Liz died on July six. He was seventy four at the time and living in Germany, and he had towards the end developed some health conditions, such as a dima and cataracts, but his cause of death was officially the result of pneumonia, and some historians actually theorized that he contracted pneumonia at a festival that was hosted by his daughter and his son in law, the controversial German composer and conductor Richard Wagner. Silinian List is really well known as the composer of the Hungarian Rhapsodies as well as the Faust Symphony Um but he was way more prolific than you might actually guess. He wrote in total more than seven hundred compositions, and in fact you probably actually know some of them, even if you don't think that you do, including Hungarian Rhapsody number two. It has fallen out of popularity even today, and it's been featured in cartoons including Tom and Jerry as well as Bugs Bunny. And while his music has been used in cartoons, it's also really important to remember that he did change many things about how we write and play music today, and he also inspired something else. He inspired maybe my favorite part of the research, which is, as soon as I found it, I was sending posters to Holly and email a. This um he inspired the movie list Domania, directed and written by Ken Russell. So imagine, if you will, the opening scene, which is List played by The Who's Roger Daltry. That's where he shows up. He's performing to a crowd of screaming fans, Ringo Star makes an appearance as the Pope. And the ending, well, okay, so the ending, You're really just gonna have to watch that for yourself. Here's what I really love about this, Like, did you think about the connection between Franz List smashing his pianos and The Who's Pete Townsend smashing his guitars. Yes, In fact, I originally thought that that maybe I would talk a little about that in the show, Like we would never have had Jimmy Hendricks lighting his guitars and fire and damaging his amps, and and like Keith Moon and Pete Townsend and all these guys who destroy their instruments. There's even there are pianists today who as part of their performance, light the piano on fire as they're playing. You know this would not have happened without Franz list Um, and so he changed everything. Holly, Yes, Um, what about this story here of Olga and Frons inspires your drinking today? Okay, So today's chaser is the winner in a head to head battle between two cocktails at my house, and it's exciting. It's exciting. It's like a race. I had two very different ideas, and I won't. I won't entirely detail the losing drink because I'm keeping it in my pocket in case I want to use some variation of it for a future episode. I think that's smart. The one that was discarded, um was a drink because of Olga Janina's cigar smoking. I immediately thought, oh, I've got to do something with Kooniak, right, since cigars and Kogiak are so closely linked. And I was like, well, I'm gonna play around with something that's kind of like a sidecar, and I'll I'll sub out a different liquor for the the orange liqueur that's normally in that right. Nobody can see me, but I'm nodding along like I'm learning. I got to a place it was pretty good, but I still wasn't sure if that was the one for this episod. And then I had this idea for a cocktail called a smashed Piano. I'm sorry, I need a minute. Okay, I got my minute. I love anytime that I destroyed Maria with. It's really my goal in all things. It works like every episode I was died. So the smashed Piano. I wanted to make a drink that is white, like you know modern day piano keys. I believe we call that ivory, right, but the drink is and ivory drink might look like it had gone off. Not quite. So this is a very easy what I would call a one to three drink, because there's just one ounce of each. It's an ounce of white rum, an ounce of Saint Germain, which is elderberry liquor, and then an ounce of your milky substance. I did oat milk, but could do You could do a dairy milk. You could do any other like plant based milk or nut based milk you want, and you just give that a nice gud shake and your shaker over ice and pour it ideally into like a chilled glass and it is this yummy, creamy It's very dessert e because the that liquor is quite sweet and the milk adds kind of enhances that sweetness. You don't really taste any bite from the rum and it's just like a lovely little after dinner dessert drink, I think. So I have two questions for you. Yes, do you have a glass recommendation for this one? Because it is a dessert drink. I went to my favorite the Coop, which how most dessert drinks are are often served because that nice wide mouth on it gives you, like easy you can take a nice big sip and get that sweet, sugary full mouth feel. I would throw it in your fridge for a little while, or even the freezer if you're short on time, and just pre chill your glass because it just makes it that much better. And my second question for you them let me interview. Okay, now, the Elderberry I'm a big fan of, but it's only come up once before and I can't recall what drink it was that you made with it. Do you remember? I know this was in season one, so I actually wasn't so that was actually the drink that we did um, which was not one that I came up with. It was one that I found. It was an early drink. Then the Julia Tafauna pimpanella that's right, which just has like the tiniest amount of Saint Germaine. It's only a quarter of an ounce because it can really like overtake a drink, and if you didn't want to super sweet drink, you would not want to put as much as an ounce in, but did You can always dial that back if it's a little too sweet for you and do more like three quarters of an ounce or even a half. But I like a one one one because it's easy. You can use the same jigger cup and you're good. Excellent. That sounds delicious. Thank you. Uh, smashed piano, I got a smash piano. I have this dream, this is truly my dream of life, is that some poor soul will walk into a bar and ask for one of these weird drinks that I've come up like, I don't know what you're talking about, and they're like, listen to this, No, I swear it's real. It's real. I would like a smashed piano and I'll be like, I don't know what that is. I heard it on the internet. And with that, and with that you heard it here on the internet. We hope you'd keep hearing us here on the internet and that you come back and join us next week for more cackling and cocktails as well as more stalking. The drink I have planned for an upcoming episode is going to be one that Maria loves. I believe in my heart and soul. Is it going to have Is it going to be a brown beverage? It is going to be a brown spirit at the heart of it. But I'm doing something a whack of noodle with it. Well, I can't wait. It's going to be exciting for me. I get this. So we hope to see you back here next week on Criminalia and remember drink responsibly. Criminalia is a production of Shonda land Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio, please visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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