ecclesiastical Latin language, make fascinating reading for anyone so minded. They
show the efforts Carolyne made over a number of years to obtain her annulment and the
scrupulousness of the church authorities in following due process.
Nicholas subsequently died, thus resolving any question of a canonical bar. Actually, the
marriage between Liszt and Carolyne never took place. Liszt took minor religious orders
and they went their separate ways. Carolyne lived in Rome and Liszt shared his time
between Weimar, Budapest and Rome. Liszt wrote to her two or three times a week
about all his musical doings and when he stayed in Rome dined with her every evening.
They remained the closest and most devoted of friends until his death.
On hearing of Liszt’s death Carolyne suffered a stroke and took to her bed. She died not
long after this, but not before completing her long-term project, a multi-volume treatise in
French about the exterior causes of the interior weaknesses of the church. She had been
working on her monumental treatise in her sunless, cigar-smoke filled apartment in Rome
for years and had been publishing each volume after it was written. It must have taken
the ecclesiastical authorities out of their comfort zone because two of the 24 volumes
were placed on the index librorum prohibitorum. Carolyne’s magnum opus remains to
this day unloved and unread, covered in dust in a library somewhere.
WOODWARD
Roger Woodward was born in Sydney in 1942 and studied piano at the Sydney
Conservatorium of Music with the Russian born pianist and teacher Alexander
Sverjensky who had himself been a pupil of Sergei Rachmaninoff and of Liszt pupil
Alexander Siloti. Woodward also studied church music with Kenneth Long, conducting
with Sir Eugene Goosens and composition with Raymond Hanson. In 1964 he won the
Commonwealth finals of the ABC Concerto and Vocal Competition before continuing his
piano studies at the National Chopin Academy for Music in Warsaw, Poland, with
Zbigniew Drzewiecki who was a friend of Karol Szymanowski and had been a pupil of
Ignacy Jan Paderewski.
Roger Woodward has performed all the Beethoven’s piano sonatas and all Chopin’s
piano works and has performed and recorded works from the entire range of the piano
repertoire including twentieth century and contemporary composers. He has performed
piano concertos with the world’s major orchestras and conductors and is a Steinway artist.
In the 1980 Queen’s Birthday Honours he was appointed an Officer of the Order of the
British Empire (OBE). In the 1992 Queen’s Birthday Honours he was appointed a
Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) ‘for service to music, particularly as a pianist,
and to the promotion of Australian composition’. In 1993 he was appointed a
Commander of the Polish Order of Merit. In 2005 he was appointed a Chevalier of the
Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and was designated a lifelong National Treasure by the
Australian National Trust. In 2007 he was appointed to the Polish Order of Solidarity.
He has received the degree of honorary Doctor of Music from the University of Sydney.