Franz Liszt: Mephisto Waltz No 1

Princess Carolyne was undoubtedly a refined princess but she used to smoke cigars and talk a lot, as the composer and pianist Hans von Büllow, Liszt's son-in-law, married to his daughter Cosima, told everyone. (Perhaps because of being that talkative, Cosima left him later to live life with the love of his life, 25 years her senior, Richard Wagner.)
Apart from that, Princess Carolyne was indeed a good woman who devoted her life to Franz accomplishments, including in that commitment the remote monitoring of the education of the composer's children, besides the wise suggestion that he will abandon the concert tours to devote all his energies to composition.

While all this was going on, Carolyne's request for divorce from her prince and army officer Nikolaus, still awaited the decision of the Holy See, an issue that Carolyne will have favorably resolved only in 1855, ten years after the process started and shortly after Nikolaus had remarried. But, one thing was becoming divorced, obtaining permission to get married, quite another. The church ruled that Nikolaus was right to do so (because he was a Protestant) but Carolyne did not, showing little regard for the princess's devotion to theological studies.

The permission to marry was finally granted to Carolyne in 1860, five years after the divorce. Franz wanted to get married right then, but she suggested to do it in Rome the following year, by the time the composer turned 50, on October 22, 1861.
And so they agreed. But on the 21st, the eve of the wedding, an emissary of the Pope knocked on the door of Carolyne's house in Rome, to announce that a new revision of the procedure was required.

The Mephisto Waltz
The piece popularly known as Mephisto Waltz is the first of four waltzes with the same title composed by Liszt at different times. The piano version – there is one for the orchestra and one for two pianos – was born around 1860 although its harmonic innovations presage the spirit of the music of future composers as Ravel or Prokofiev.
Consequently, I advise patience and willingness in listening to the first two and a half minutes, because it hardly can be assumed as music from the mid-nineteenth century. There are no Love Dream or Consolations here, but Liszt and romanticism, although it may not seem so at the beginning.
With that in mind, enjoy the following comment on Youtube on this piece, a somewhat different opinion about Lisztian "bravery":
"I saw this shit in a bugs bunny episode ... and the piano exploded".

The rendition is by the Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky.

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