It might be better to use the expression ‘black music’ instead of ‘ragtime’ here as the word ‘ragtime’ came into use only in the last years of the 19th century. The question is whether Liszt could have known about black pre-ragtime genres, since they started to appear in the middle of the century. The ‘Negro music’ craze spread to Europe, too. In Germany, the first concert given by blacks was in Frankfurt on February 21, 1878 where the Fisk Jubilee Singers started their eight-month (!) European tour. According to the German posters, the group consisted of seven black women and four black men, all former slaves (ehemalige Sklaven). (It is interesting to mention that the tour fund-raiser for their school, the Fisk University of Nashville and by the end of the tour they collected 150 thousand dollars!)(11) Liszt surely did not know of this tour as he lived in Budapest in those days. But the European popularity of pre-jazz genres had already been obvious long before this date. The piano piece Le Bananier (with the subtitle ‘chanson négre’) composed by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869) in 1845 was published by the prestigious Schott in Mainz five years later, in 1850 when Liszt was in Weimar. The very first mention of the banjo is from 1839 and in 1854 W. K. Batchelder's Imitation of the Banjo came out, so did Gottschalk's Le Banjo (Grotesque fantasie, American sketch). And the appearance of black ensembles was relatively regular in Europe even before the Fisk Jubilee Singers. Ira Aldridge (born in Senegal) a singer and vaudeville comic-dancer performed in Budapest in 1853. His numbers of musically dubious value (entitled Negerlieder) were among the best sellers from 1853 to 1858 (!) in the catalog of the Rózsavölgyi publishing house.

It is absolutely uncertain whether Liszt knew anything about these. He might have heard of some of them but even if he had any personal experience, most probably neither a published work nor a performance of blacks would have made a great impression on him. Not only because their musical quality was rather low and they were more important for music history than music history (excluding the outstanding Gottschalk compositions). But also because when news spread in 1855 that Liszt was going to travel to America he called it a ‘superannuated, ridiculous hoax’ stating that he was not interested in the New World at all.(12) Thus it seems certain that Liszt was not influenced by any of the pre-jazz genres(13) so the subject of our investigation could only be the influence that comes from Liszt.