Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886) was a Hungarian composer, pianist, conductor and teacher, widely regarded as the greatest keyboard virtuoso of his century. [1] He extended piano technique beyond anything previously attempted, established the solo recital as a concert form, and as a composer created the symphonic poem and pioneered thematic transformation. [2] In later life he took minor orders in the Catholic Church and was known as the Abbé Liszt.
Early life and training
Liszt was born on 22 October 1811 in Raiding, a village in the Kingdom of Hungary within the Austrian Empire, now in Austria. [1] His father, an official in the service of the Esterházy family, was an amateur musician who gave him his first lessons. A child prodigy, he was sponsored by Hungarian noblemen to study in Vienna with Carl Czerny for piano and Antonio Salieri for composition. The family moved to Paris in 1823, where he was refused admission to the Conservatoire as a foreigner but quickly established himself as a performer in aristocratic salons. [3]
The virtuoso years
Hearing the violinist Niccolò Paganini in 1832 prompted Liszt to pursue a comparable command of the piano, and he withdrew for a period of intensive technical work. [2] From 1839 to 1847 he toured almost continuously across Europe, from Portugal to Russia, in a period of unprecedented public acclaim that the poet Heinrich Heine named Lisztomania. He gave concerts alone on stage, playing from memory and placing the instrument so the audience could see his hands, conventions that became standard practice for the recital.
His playing was matched by extraordinary generosity. He gave the proceeds of many concerts to charitable causes, including relief for flood victims in Hungary and the fund for the completion of Cologne Cathedral, and he supported the Beethoven monument in Bonn. [1]
Weimar and composition
In 1848 Liszt withdrew from touring and settled in Weimar as court music director, remaining until 1861. [3] There he conducted and championed new music, including the premiere of Richard Wagner's Lohengrin, and concentrated on composition. He produced twelve symphonic poems, a genre he originated, in which a single continuous orchestral movement is shaped by an extra-musical idea, together with the Faust and Dante symphonies and the Piano Sonata in B minor.
His enormous output also includes the Hungarian Rhapsodies, the Années de pèlerinage, the Transcendental Études, two piano concertos, a substantial body of sacred music, songs, and hundreds of transcriptions and paraphrases through which he circulated the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz and Wagner to audiences who could not hear orchestras. [4]
Later years
From 1861 Liszt divided his time between Rome, Weimar and Budapest, a pattern he called his vie trifurquée. [1] He received minor orders in the Catholic Church in 1865 and wrote increasingly austere religious works and late piano pieces whose harmonic ambiguity anticipated twentieth-century music. He taught without fee, and his students carried his approach into conservatories across Europe. His daughter Cosima married Wagner, whose work he continued to support. Liszt died in Bayreuth on 31 July 1886 while attending the festival there.
Legacy
Liszt's influence runs through the development of piano writing, the programme music of the later nineteenth century and the harmonic experiments that led toward atonality. [2] He helped establish the Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest, which bears his name, and his honours included the Order of the Golden Spur, the Bavarian Maximilian Order and the Prussian order Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts.
