Liszt was deeply devoted to the Roman Catholic Church, and eventually took holy orders, but he was also an independent thinker who did not always agree with the Church’s official views or abide by its moral precepts. It is not surprising, therefore, that his most important spiritual advisor was a dissident Catholic priest, Hugues Felicité Robert de Lamennais (1782–1854). Lamennais first achieved prominence with writings in support of the power of the Pope, but over the course of the 1820s and ’30s he came to support a variety of controversial causes, including democracy, the separation of church and state, and socialism, much to the consternation of both the Vatican and the French government. After a series of escalating disputes marked by two encyclicals from the Pope and Lamennais’s book Paroles d’un croyant, he was formally separated from the Church in 1834.

In the midst of these tumultuous events in 1834, Lamennais invited Liszt to visit him at his home in Brittany. In our letter, Liszt gratefully accepts the invitation, saying that he re-read it twenty times and was moved to tears, and asks for permission to bring his piano. He expresses his support for Paroles d’un croyant, despite all the opposition it has aroused. Liszt did go on to spend several weeks with Lamennais that summer, and while he was there he composed the Apparitions.