MusicAcross Switzerland, 1835
In June 1835, twenty-three-year-old Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult left Paris for Switzerland. Their relationship was already a scandal: she was married and the mother of two children. They met in Basel, crossed northern and central Switzerland, and reached Geneva in July.
Liszt did write and sketch music during these years, but the Swiss book of Années de pèlerinage was not a diary transferred directly to the piano. Some pieces remained close to their early form; others were substantially recomposed before publication in 1855.
William Tell’s Chapel
The journey took them through Canton Uri, the centre of the William Tell tradition. Chapelle de Guillaume Tell later became the opening piece of the Swiss cycle. Its broad chords and distant calls turn the chapel into a political as well as a physical landmark.
Liszt placed the words “Einer für Alle — Alle für Einen” above the music. The phrase is frequently attributed to Schiller, but it does not appear verbatim in Wilhelm Tell. The chapel Liszt knew was also not the present building, which dates from 1879.
On the map Tellskapelle on the shore of Lake Uri →Lake Walen
Liszt and d’Agoult reached Weesen on Lake Walen on 19 June and went out on the water. Decades later, she remembered him writing there a “melancholy harmony” that imitated the waves and the rhythm of oars.
Her memoir is retrospective and should not be treated as a precise composition diary. Even so, Au lac de Wallenstadt is one of the pieces that changed least between its early and published forms. Its steady left hand and unhurried melody still make the association with the lake easy to hear.
On the map Lake Walen beneath the Churfirsten ridge →The Bells of Geneva
In Geneva, Liszt taught at the newly founded conservatoire, and the couple’s daughter Blandine was born on 18 December 1835. An early version of Les cloches de Genève was dedicated to her and carried Byron’s line, “I live not in myself, but I become / Portion of that around me.” Liszt later rewrote the piece extensively.
The commemorative plaque at today’s Place Franz-Liszt does not mark a verified home. The building was completed in 1836, and Geneva’s archival research indicates that the couple never lived there. The map pin is therefore a memorial site, not a documented doorstep.
On the map The Liszt memorial in Geneva Old Town →Listening Along the Route
Lake Walen and the shore near Tell’s Chapel can still be visited, but this is not a single modern hiking itinerary. It is better approached as Liszt approached it: one place, and one piece of music, at a time.