Franz Liszt, Hungarian form Liszt Ferenc (born October 22, 1811, Raiding, Hungary—died July 31, 1886, Bayreuth, Germany), Hungarian piano virtuoso and composer. Among his many notable compositions are his 12 symphonic poems, two (completed) piano concerti, several sacred choral works, and a great variety of solo piano pieces.
Youth and early training
Liszt’s father, Ádám Liszt, was an official in the service of Prince Nicolas Eszterházy, whose palace in Eisenstadt was frequented by many celebrated musicians. Ádám Liszt was a talented amateur musician who played the cello in the court concerts. By the time Franz was five years old, he was already attracted to the piano and was soon given lessons by his father. He began to show interest in both church and Gypsy music. He developed into a religious child, also because of the influence of his father, who during his youth had spent two years in the Franciscan order.
Franz began to compose at the age of eight. When only nine he made his first public appearance as a concert pianist at Sopron and Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia). His playing so impressed the local Hungarian magnates that they put up the money to pay for his musical education for the next six years. Ádám obtained leave of absence from his post and took Franz to Vienna, where he had piano lessons with Carl Czerny, a composer and pianist who had been a pupil of Ludwig van Beethoven, and studied composition with Antonio Salieri, the musical director at the Viennese court. He gave several concerts in Vienna, with great success. The legend that Beethoven attended one of Liszt’s concerts and kissed the prodigy on the forehead is considered apocryphal—but Liszt certainly met Beethoven.
Liszt moved with his family to Paris in 1823, giving concerts in Germany on the way. He was refused admission to the Paris Conservatoire because he was a foreigner; instead, he studied with Anton Reicha, a theorist who had been a pupil of Joseph Haydn’s brother Michael, and Ferdinando Paer, the director of the Théâtre-Italien in Paris and a composer of light operas. Liszt’s Paris debut on March 7, 1824, was sensational. Other concerts quickly followed, as well as a visit to London in June. He toured England again the following year, playing for George IV at Windsor Castle and also visiting Manchester, where his New Grand Overture was performed for the first time. This piece was used as the overture to his one-act opera Don Sanche, which was performed at the Paris Opéra on October 17, 1825. In 1826 he toured France and Switzerland, returning to England again in the following year. Suffering from nervous exhaustion, Liszt expressed a desire to become a priest. His father took him to Boulogne to take sea baths to improve his health; there Ádám died of typhoid fever. Liszt returned to Paris and sent for his mother to join him; she had gone back to the Austrian province of Styria during his tours.
Liszt now earned his living mainly as a piano teacher, and in 1828 he fell in love with one of his pupils. When her father insisted that the attachment be broken off, Liszt again became extremely ill; he was considered so close to death that his obituary appeared in a Paris newspaper. After his illness he underwent a long period of depression and doubt about his career. For more than a year he did not touch the piano and was dissuaded from joining the priesthood only through the efforts of his mother. He experienced much religious pessimism. During this period Liszt took an active dislike to the career of a virtuoso. He made up for his previous lack of education by reading widely, and he came into contact with many of the leading artists of the day, including Alphonse de Lamartine, Victor Hugo, and Heinrich Heine. With the July Revolution of 1830 resulting in the abdication of the French king Charles X and the coronation of Louis-Philippe, he sketched out a Revolutionary Symphony.
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Between 1830 and 1832 he met three men who were to have a great influence on his artistic life. At the end of 1830 he first met Hector Berlioz and heard the first performance of his Symphonie fantastique. From Berlioz he inherited the command of the Romantic orchestra and also the diabolic quality that remained with him for the rest of his life. He achieved the seemingly impossible feat of transcribing Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique for the piano in 1833, and he helped Berlioz by transcribing other works of his and playing them in concert. In March 1831 he heard Niccolò Paganini play for the first time. He again became interested in virtuoso technique and resolved to transfer some of Paganini’s fantastic violin effects to the piano, writing a fantasia on his La campanella. At this time he also met Frédéric Chopin, whose poetical style of music exerted a profound influence on Liszt.
Years with Marie d’Agoult
In 1834 Liszt emerged as a mature composer with the solo piano piece Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, based on a collection of poems by Lamartine, and the set of three Apparitions. The lyrical style of these works is in marked contrast to his youthful compositions, which reflected the style of his teacher Czerny. In the same year, through the poet and dramatist Alfred de Musset, he met the novelist George Sand and also Marie de Flavigny, countess d’Agoult, with whom he began an affair. In 1835 she left her husband and family to join Liszt in Switzerland; their first daughter, Blandine, was born in Geneva on December 18. Liszt and Madame d’Agoult lived together for four years, mainly in Switzerland and Italy, though Liszt made occasional visits to Paris. He also taught at the newly founded Geneva Conservatory and published a series of essays, “
On the Position of Artists,” in which he endeavoured to raise the status of the artist—who up to then had been regarded as a kind of superior servant—to that of a respected member of the community.
Liszt commemorated his years with Madame d’Agoult in the first two books of solo piano pieces collectively named Années de pèlerinage (1837–54; Years of Pilgrimage), which are poetical evocations of Swiss and Italian scenes. He also wrote the first mature version of the Transcendental Études (1838, 1851); these are works for solo piano based on his youthful Étude en 48 exercices, but here transformed into pieces of terrifying virtuosity. He transcribed for the piano six of Paganini’s pieces—five studies and La campanella—and also three Beethoven symphonies, some songs by Franz Schubert, and further works of Berlioz. He made these transcriptions to make the work of these men more available and thus spread the appreciation of their music, which was still greatly neglected at that time. Liszt also wrote a number of fantasias on popular operas of the day and dazzled audiences with them at his concerts.
His second daughter, Cosima, was born in 1837 and his son, Daniel, in 1839, but toward the end of that year his relations with Madame d’Agoult became strained and she returned to Paris with the children. Liszt then returned to his career as a virtuoso to raise money for the Beethoven Memorial Committee in Bonn for the completion of its Beethoven monument.
For the next eight years Liszt traveled all over Europe, giving concerts in countries as far apart as Ireland, Portugal, Turkey, and Russia. He continued to spend his summer holidays with Madame d’Agoult and the children on the island of Nonnenwerth in the Rhine River until 1844; then they finally parted, and Liszt took the children to Paris. Liszt’s brilliance and success were at their peak during these years as a virtuoso. Everywhere he was received with great adulation; gifts and decorations were showered on him, and he had numerous mistresses, including the dancer Lola Montez and Marie Duplessis. Nevertheless, he still continued to compose, writing songs as well as piano works.
His visit to Hungary in 1839–40, the first since his boyhood, was an important event. His renewed interest in the music of the Gypsies laid the foundations for his Hungarian Rhapsodies and other piano pieces composed in the Hungarian style. He also wrote a cantata for the Beethoven Festival of 1845, his first work for chorus and orchestra, and some smaller choral works.
Compositions at Weimar
In February 1847 Liszt met the princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein at Kiev and later spent some time at her estate in Poland. She quickly persuaded him to give up his career as a virtuoso and to concentrate on composition. He gave his final concert at Yelizavetgrad (Kirovograd) in September of that year. Having been director of music extraordinary to the Weimar court in Germany since 1843, and having conducted concerts there since 1844, Liszt decided to settle there permanently in 1848. He was later joined by the princess, who had unsuccessfully tried to obtain a divorce from her husband. They resided together in Weimar, and Liszt now had ample time to compose, as well as to conduct the court orchestra in operas and concerts. This was the period of his greatest production: the first 12 symphonic poems, A Faust Symphony (1854; rev. 1857–61), A Symphony to Dante’s Divina Commedia (1855–56), the Piano Sonata in B Minor (1852–53), the Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-Flat Major (1849; rev. 1853 and 1856), and the Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major (1839; rev. 1849–61). (A third piano concerto, in E-flat, composed in 1839, was left unperformed during his lifetime and was not discovered until 1988.) During the period in Weimar Liszt also composed the Totentanz for piano and orchestra, revised versions of the Transcendental and Paganini Études and of the first two books of the Années de pèlerinage, choral works, and numerous others. Some of these works had been sketched out in the 1840s or earlier, but, even so, his productivity in this period remains astonishing.
The avant-garde composers of the day regarded Weimar as the one city where modern composers could be heard, and many of them came to Liszt as pupils. The so-called New German school hoisted the banner of modernism, which naturally annoyed the more academic musicians. Some members of the Weimar court also were upset by Liszt’s continued support of the composer Richard Wagner, who had had to flee in 1849 with Liszt’s help from Germany to Switzerland because of his political activism. The straitlaced citizens of Weimar also objected strongly to the princess openly living with Liszt, and the grand duchess of Weimar was under pressure from her brother, Nicholas I of Russia, to ban Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein from all court functions. Furthermore, the grand duke who originally appointed Liszt died in 1853, and his successor took little interest in music. Liszt resigned five years later, and, though he remained in Weimar until 1861, his position there became more and more difficult. His son, Daniel, had died in 1859 at the age of 20. Liszt was deeply distressed and wrote the oration for orchestra Les Morts in his son’s memory. In May 1860 the princess had left Weimar for Rome in the hope of having her divorce sanctioned by the pope, and in September, in a troubled state of mind, Liszt had made his will. He left Weimar in August of the following year, and after traveling to Berlin and Paris, where he saw Marie d’Agoult, he arrived in Rome. He and the princess hoped to be married on his 50th birthday. At the last moment, however, the pope revoked his sanction of the princess’s divorce; they both remained in Rome in separate establishments.
Eight years in Rome
For the next eight years Liszt lived mainly in Rome and occupied himself more and more with religious music. He completed the oratorios Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth (1857–62) and Christus (1855–66) and a number of smaller works. He hoped to create a new kind of religious music that would be more direct and moving than the rather sentimental style popular at the time. Liszt was one of the few 19th-century musicians to be interested in Gregorian plainsong, but his efforts were frowned on by the ecclesiastical authorities, and much of his sacred music remained unpublished until many years after his death.
In 1862 his daughter Blandine died at the age of 26. Liszt wrote his variations on a theme from the J.S. Bach cantata Weinen, Klagen (Weeping, Mourning) ending with the chorale Was Gott tut das ist wohlgetan (What God Does Is Well Done), which must have been inspired by this event. The princess’s husband died in 1864, but there was no more talk of marriage, and in 1865 Liszt took the four minor orders of the Roman Catholic Church, though he never became a priest. In 1867 he wrote the Hungarian Coronation Mass for the coronation of the emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria as king of Hungary. This commission renewed his links with his native land. Meanwhile, his daughter Cosima, who, at the age of 19, had married Liszt’s favourite pupil, Hans von Bülow, was having an affair with Richard Wagner. She had an illegitimate child by Wagner, which led to a quarrel between the two composers that lasted until 1872.
In 1869 Liszt was invited to return to Weimar by the grand duke to give master classes in piano playing, and two years later he was asked to do the same in Budapest. From then until the end of his life he divided his time between Rome, Weimar, and Budapest. After a reconciliation with Wagner in 1872, Liszt regularly attended the Bayreuth festivals. He appeared occasionally as a pianist in charity concerts and continued to compose. His music began to lose some of its brilliant quality and became starker, more introverted, and more experimental in style. His later works anticipate the harmonic style of Claude Debussy, and one late work called Bagatelle Without Tonality anticipates Béla Bartók and even Arnold Schoenberg.
In 1886 Liszt left Rome for the last time. He attended concerts of his works in Budapest, Liège, and Paris and then went to London—his first visit there in 45 years—where several concerts of his works were given. He then went on to Antwerp, Paris, and Weimar. He played for the last time at a concert in Luxembourg on July 19. Two days later he arrived in Bayreuth for the festival. His health had not been good for some months, and he went to bed with a high fever, though he still managed to attend two Wagner performances. His final illness developed into pneumonia, and his condition was not helped by the callous behaviour of Cosima, who left him alone in order to supervise the running of the festival. He died on July 31.
Liszt was not only the greatest piano virtuoso of his time but also a composer of enormous originality and a principal figure in the Romantic movement. As a composer he radically extended the technique of piano writing, giving the instrument not only brilliance but a full and rich, almost orchestral sound. Most of his compositions bear titles and are representations of some natural scene or of some poetic idea or work of literature or art. Liszt extended the harmonic language of his time, even in his earlier works, and his later development of chromatic harmony helped lead eventually to the breakdown of tonality and ultimately to the atonal music of the 20th century. Liszt also invented the symphonic poem for orchestra and the method of “transformation of themes,” by which one or two themes in different forms can provide the basis for an entire work—a principle from which Wagner derived his system of so-called leitmotifs in his operas.
As a pianist Liszt was the first to give complete solo recitals, and he did a great deal to encourage the performance of music by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Wagner, and Robert Schumann by transcribing their works for piano and playing them in his concerts at a time when they were insufficiently appreciated. He also helped younger composers, including Edvard Grieg, Mily Balakirev, Aleksandr Borodin, and Claude Debussy, and he taught a number of pupils who themselves became famous virtuosos.
Apart from his more than 700 compositions, Liszt was the author of books on Frédéric Chopin, Hungarian Gypsy music, Wagner’s Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, John Field’s nocturnes, the lieder of Robert Franz, and the Goethe Foundation in Weimar. His published essays and correspondence fill many volumes. A controversial figure in his time, he was attacked for his innovations, and his rivals were jealous of his brilliance and panache. For a long time he was regarded merely as a superficial composer of brilliant trifles, but in recent years his true stature has been seen more clearly as that of a composer who revolutionized the music of his time and anticipated numerous later developments. As Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein said, “Liszt has flung his spear far into the future.”