Lisztomania (1975)

Roger Daltrey: Franz Liszt

Photos 

Quotes 

• Cosima : I've polished your sword! What do you want it for, to kill the critics?

  Liszt : Time kills critics, my dear.

• Liszt : Oh, piss off, Brahms!

• Liszt : I know it sounds improbable, Your Holiness, but I...

  The Pope : But truth is stranger than fiction? We've kept going for two thousand years on that one.

• Richard Wagner : The trouble with your friends, Liszt, is they're all bourgeois pigs.

  Liszt : Oh, pigs if you please. But aristocratic pigs, not bourgeois.

• Princess Carolyn : You and the Tsar are just different sides of the same coin: false gods worshiped in different ways. Dress the Tsar as a peasant and you have a peasant.

  [searches for Liszt] 

  Princess Carolyn : Stop skulking behind that screen!

  [continues] 

  Princess Carolyn : Dress Liszt in a crinoline and what do you have? The same thing: a sham. Rather than walk naked through the world, he chooses to play the imposter. What do you say?

  Liszt : Bollocks!

  Princess Carolyn : "Bollocks"? I don't speak Hungarian.

• Liszt : Her Majesty gets a lot of satisfaction out of a good smoke?

  Princess Carolyn : It's the perfect form of pleasure. It's exquisite and leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one ask?

• The Pope : What do you want out of life?

  Liszt : Just to write good music and have a roof over my head.

  The Pope : That's not much to ask. Now we could do with some good music.

• Liszt : I always feel that people who like Brahms would prefer to have no music at all. He's a right wanker.

• Liszt : As yet he's unknown, but, he's a great talent and he's somewhere in the audience tonight. HIs name's Richard Wagner. Richard, where are you? Richard? Ah, Richard. Stand up. Take a bow. That's enough. Besides being German, Richard has something else in common with Beethoven. He's a bleedin' genius. How do I know? You told me so yourself, didn't you, Richard?

• Liszt : Well, we are in show business, Dickie.

  Richard Wagner : Yes! Because to you the piano is just - a harlot!

  Liszt : Yeah, and every penny owned by that harlot tonight goes to build a monument to your beloved Beethoven, which your beloved countrymen so belovedly neglected to build.

• Marie d'Agoult : Take me with you on your tours.

  Liszt : Remember the scandal when we tried that in London?

  Marie d'Agoult : Its not my fault if the English are prudes.

  Liszt : The box office took a proper bloody nose to it.

  Marie d'Agoult : Oh, bugger the box office!

• Liszt : They never heard me play in Russia. It would be a shame to waste that good publicity.

  Marie d'Agoult : And while you're storming Moscow, Napoleon, I suppose I'm expected to sit at home like Josephine, saving your press cuttings and knitting your mittens.

  Liszt : I won't be cold, love. Not with all those Russian muffs around.

  [sticks out and wiggles his tongue] 

• Marie d'Agoult : I believed in you then.

  Liszt : All you believed in was a stiff cock and the fact that your old man never had one.

• Liszt : I must admit, my professor had to tell me the meanings of the sixth and ninth commandments.

  Princess Carolyn : Let us practice the 69th - together.

• Princess Carolyn : Come. We must pray.

  Liszt : Pray?

  Princess Carolyn : No longer must you prostitute your art. Music, like sex, should be approached in a religious spirit. As one of the holiest things in life.

• Liszt : [singing]  My shame, Be my gain, Together we can light the flames, Flames of life, Flames of truth

• Liszt : [singing]  Life is pain, Pain is loss, Life is pain, Pain is loss, Loss is mine for living, While innocents are dying...

• Princess Carolyn : Some little guttersnipe has written an obscene book about you and the Tsar, for one, is outraged.

  [hands Liszt the book] 

  Liszt : "Lisztomania" Marie? Oh, God. It can't be. Why should she?

• Princess Carolyn : Then, you can become a saint.

  Liszt : Saint Franz Liszt!

  Princess Carolyn : You must become a Franziscan!

• Liszt : What about his soul, Richard? What good's a leader without a soul?

• Cosima : Beautiful. I recognize the theme that Wagner borrowed - stole.

  Liszt : He was welcome to it. I had plenty more. I didn't mind him taking it. It was what he did with it was horrible.

  Princess Carolyn : Let's face it. We were all pretty horrible - and selfish.

  Marie d'Agoult : The bad is dead and buried. The best of us lives on, enshrined in his music. And that's for everyone to share.

  Lola Montez : Forever.

  Cosima : Forever

• Liszt : Don't tell me you're going in for electronic music.

  Richard Wagner : German music is good enough for me! Or, will be, when we rid it of the Jews.

  Liszt : Who's gonna do that? Your Man of Iron? He's a long time coming.