Composer
Franz Liszt
The piano's first touring superstar, and the composer who invented the symphonic poem.
Franz Liszt was, before he was much else, the piano's first genuine touring virtuoso celebrity - inspired to pursue that level of showmanship after seeing the violinist Niccolò Paganini perform in Paris, he built a career whose piano recitals reportedly provoked crowd reactions intense enough that the phenomenon earned its own name, "Lisztomania."
Life in brief
Liszt was born in 1811 in Raiding, then in the Kingdom of Hungary, where his father worked as a steward for the Esterházy family. A spectacular child prodigy, he studied in Vienna with Carl Czerny (himself a pupil of Beethoven) before his family moved to Paris.
In the 1830s he lived with the Countess Marie d'Agoult, with whom he had three children - one of them, Cosima, would later marry Wagner. Then, for most of the 1840s, he toured Europe relentlessly, from Ireland to Turkey, giving concerts on a scale nobody had attempted before. He is often credited with inventing the solo piano recital, playing an entire program from memory, and he gave large sums from his concerts to charity - including funding a monument to Beethoven in Bonn.
In 1848, at the height of his fame, he largely gave up touring and became music director at the court of Weimar, where he composed, conducted (he gave the premiere of Wagner's Lohengrin), and championed new music. Later he lived partly in Rome, took minor holy orders, and became known as the "Abbé Liszt." He taught hundreds of pianists over his lifetime and is said never to have charged them a fee. He died in Bayreuth in 1886.
Music and style
Liszt expanded what the piano could do: dazzling runs, thundering octaves, and textures so full they rival an orchestra. But his music isn't only display. He loved literature, painting, and religion, and much of his work is poetic or spiritual in character.
His Hungarian Rhapsodies, drawing on Hungarian and Romani folk melody, did more than any other works to popularize the rhapsody as a genre: a free, episodic structure built for emotional and technical display rather than following inherited forms like the symphony. Liszt also invented the symphonic poem outright - a single-movement orchestral work built to depict a specific subject - a form Richard Strauss and others would later take even further.
Key works
- Hungarian Rhapsodies - especially No. 2, the cartoon favorite.
- Liebestraum No. 3 ("Dream of Love") - his most tender piano piece.
- Piano Sonata in B minor (1853) - one vast, continuous movement, and one of the great piano sonatas. See sonata.
- Transcendental Études and "La campanella" - piano etudes of extreme difficulty.
- Les préludes - the best known of his symphonic poems.
- Piano Concerto No. 1 and the Faust Symphony.
- Transcriptions - piano versions of all nine Beethoven symphonies, Schubert songs, and operatic scenes, which spread other composers' music in an age before recordings.
Legacy
Later in life, Liszt largely retired from public performance and turned to composing and teaching, producing increasingly experimental late works - spare, strange pieces like Nuages gris ("Grey Clouds") - that anticipated some of the harmonic ambiguity 20th-century composers would fully embrace. Through his pupils, his championing of Wagner and others, and his invention of the recital, he shaped musical life long after his death.
Where to start listening: Liebestraum No. 3 is his most tender, widely loved piano piece; Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 shows the technical fireworks that built his reputation. For something completely different, try one of his haunting late pieces, such as Nuages gris.