Creative History

  Philip Spencer is a nineteen year old hard drinking party animal.  He is  a frat boy at sea and a perpetual ne’er do well who has a problem with authority.  He left school as a teenager and ran away from home to find adventure on the high seas, but when his parents caught wind of where he was they quickly had him snatched up and brought back home against his will. Philip’s father told him that if he wanted to go to sea to find adventure he would have to do so as a member of the United States Navy.  Now, in the Autumn of 1842 Philip Spencer finds himself commissioned as an unwilling midshipman in the U.S. Navy aboard the newly launched brigantine the USS Somers .  His father, the man who gave Philip the commission in the United States Navy that he never wanted in the first place, is John Canfield Spencer, a former Congressman from New York and in November of 1842 the current Secretary of War (a position analogous to today’s Secretary of Defense) in the administration of John Tyler t

  “Lisztomania, a condition in which swooning female fans collected his cigar butts to secrete in their cleavages.” - from the New York Times, January 14, 2001 Famed 19th century German lyric poet Heinrich Heine, known for his radical political views and satirical verse that was often set to music, coined the term “Lisztomania” to describe the phenomena that he witnessed in concert halls across Europe during the 1840’s. Lisztomania, or “Liszt Fever” as it came to be called in the English speaking world was a phrase that quickly caught on  among members of the mid-nineteenth century press and public to describe the frenzied adoration, fanaticism, and hero-worship that surrounded the young good looking composer and piano virtuoso Franz Liszt on his yearly concert tours across continental Europe between 1839 and 1847. Young women would creep up behind the young pianist and try to snip off lockets of his hair. Admiring fans would pour the backwash of his coffee cups into glass jars a