Ferenc Liszt

Liszt played the last paid concert of his career in Ukraine — Elisavetgrad, September 1847 — then walked off the touring circuit at 35 and took a court post in Weimar. His Uzhhorod bronze has had no such quiet retirement. Inside five years the 20cm figure was knocked off its railing by a falling chestnut, painted over, stolen twice, and finally rehoused on the other side of town. That last move is why the composer now sits on a suitcase.

He first appeared in May 2012, on the embankment rail opposite the Zakarpattia Regional Philharmonic.

What Liszt has to do with Uzhhorod

Less than the city claims, and enough for a statue. Liszt was born in 1811 at Doborján, in the Kingdom of Hungary — the kingdom Uzhhorod belonged to as Ungvár — which gives Zakarpattia the same claim on him as anywhere else once Hungarian. His original spot faced the Philharmonic: a synagogue built in 1904, a concert hall since 1957. A composer placed opposite the room where his music is played needs no further argument.

The local anecdotes reach for more and do not survive a check. One has Liszt staying at a friend's manor in Velyki Lazy, outside the city; the palace there went up in 1896, ten years after he died. Another has him giving an organ recital in Uzhhorod in 1848 on his way to a secret wedding with Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. He met her in Kyiv in 1847, and they never married — the Vatican stopped the ceremony in 1861, on his fiftieth birthday.

The most-stolen object in the city

Summer 2012: a storm dropped part of a chestnut onto the railing and broke it into pieces, and the section carrying the composer went missing. Municipal workers eventually found it down on the bank of the Uzh and put it back. That December someone painted a stretch of the same railing yellow. In early 2013 the figure was taken again, and again recovered. In January 2017 it vanished for good.

Kolodko recast it, and the city moved it off the big river altogether — round to the quieter channel of the Malyi Uzh, where it has stayed put since.

Why the suitcase

The suitcase was not in the original design. It arrived with the relocation, and it lets the figure read two ways at once: Liszt spent two decades crossing Europe by carriage as the most famous performer alive, and the statue itself had just been forced to move house. A run of thefts turned into the punchline.

It travels in other senses too. In April 2018 a version of the same small composer was unveiled at Budapest's Ferenc Liszt International Airport; another copy stands in Chernivtsi. Kolodko calls the practice “partisan art” — bronzes bolted up first, permissions never sought — and of his Uzhhorod pieces this one has got out furthest.

Finding it

The composer sits at the corner of Zhupanatska Square where vul. Fedyntsia meets vul. Dovzhenka, a few minutes' walk from the Philharmonic he used to face. He is at railing height, on his case, unmistakable from a couple of metres and invisible from twenty.