Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor and teacher of the Romantic period. With a diverse body of work spanning more than six decades, he is considered to be one of the most prolific and influential composers of his era, and his piano works continue to be widely performed and recorded.
Liszt achieved success as a concert pianist from an early age, and received lessons from the esteemed musicians Carl Czerny and Antonio Salieri. He gained further renown for his performances during tours of Europe in the 1830s and 1840s, developing a reputation for technical brilliance as well as physical attractiveness. In a phenomenon dubbed "Lisztomania", he rose to a degree of stardom and popularity among the public not experienced by the virtuosos who preceded him.
During this period and into his later life, Liszt was a friend, musical promoter and benefactor to many composers of his time, including Hector Berlioz, Frédéric Chopin, Robert Schumann, Clara Schumann and Richard Wagner, among others. Liszt coined the terms "transcription" and "paraphrase", and would perform arrangements of his contemporaries' music to popularise it. Alongside Wagner, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the New German School, a progressive group of composers involved in the "War of the Romantics" who developed ideas of programmatic music and harmonic experimentation.
Liszt taught piano performance to hundreds of students throughout his life, many of whom went on to become notable performers. He left behind an extensive and diverse body of work that influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated 20th-century ideas and trends. Among Liszt's musical contributions were the concept of the symphonic poem, innovations in thematic transformation and Impressionism in music, and the invention of the masterclass as a method of teaching performance. In a radical departure from his earlier compositional styles, many of Liszt's later works also feature experiments in atonality, foreshadowing developments in 20th-century classical music. Today he is best known for his original piano works, such as the Hungarian Rhapsodies, Années de pèlerinage, Transcendental Études, "La campanella", and the Piano Sonata in B minor.
Life
Early life
Franz Liszt was born to Anna Liszt and Adam Liszt on 22 October 1811, in the village of Doborján in Sopron County, in the Kingdom of Hungary, which was part of the Habsburg monarchy. Liszt's father was a land steward in the service of Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy; a keen amateur musician, he played the piano, guitar and flute, and knew Haydn and Hummel personally. A renowned child prodigy, Franz began to improvise at the piano from before the age of five, and his father diligently encouraged his progress. Franz also found exposure to music through attending Mass, as well as travelling Romani bands that toured the Hungarian countryside. His first public concert was in Sopron in 1820 at the age of nine; its success led to further appearances in Pressburg and for Prince Nikolaus' court in Eisenstadt. The publicity led to a group of wealthy sponsors offering to finance Franz's musical education in Vienna.There, Liszt received piano lessons from Carl Czerny, who in his own youth had been a student of Beethoven and Hummel. Czerny, already extremely busy, had only grudgingly agreed to hear Liszt play, and had initially refused to entertain the idea of regular lessons. Being so impressed by the initial audition, however, Czerny taught Liszt regularly, free of charge, for the next eighteen months, at which point he felt he had nothing more to teach. Liszt remained grateful to his former teacher, later dedicating to him the Transcendental Études on their 1830 republication. Liszt also received lessons in composition from Antonio Salieri, the accomplished music director of the Viennese court who had previously taught Beethoven and Schubert. Like Czerny, Salieri was highly impressed by Liszt's improvisation and sight-reading abilities.
Liszt's public debut in Vienna on 1 December 1822 was a great success. He was greeted in Austrian and Hungarian aristocratic circles and met Beethoven and Schubert. To build on his son's success, Adam Liszt decided to take the family to Paris, the centre of the artistic world. At Liszt's final Viennese concert on 13 April 1823, Beethoven was reputed to have walked onstage and kissed Liszt on the forehead, to signify a kind of artistic christening. There is debate, however, on the extent to which this story is apocryphal. The family briefly returned to Hungary, and Liszt played a concert in traditional Hungarian dress, in order to emphasise his roots, in May 1823.
In 1824 a piece Liszt had written at the age of 11 – his Variation on a Waltz by Diabelli – appeared in of Vaterländischer Künstlerverein as his first published composition. This volume, commissioned by Anton Diabelli, includes 50 variations on his waltz by 50 different composers. Liszt was the youngest contributor to the project, described in it as "a boy of eleven years old"; Czerny was also a participant.
Paris
Having made significant sums from his concerts, Liszt and his family moved to Paris in 1823, with the hope of his attending the Conservatoire de Paris. Even with a letter of recommendation from Chancellor Klemens von Metternich, director Luigi Cherubini refused his entry, however, as the Conservatoire did not accept foreigners. Nevertheless, Liszt studied under Anton Reicha and Ferdinando Paer, and gave a series of highly successful concerts debuting on 8 March 1824. Paer was involved in the Parisian theatrical and operatic scene, and through his connections Liszt staged his only opera, Don Sanche, which premiered shortly before his fourteenth birthday. The premiere was warmly received, but the opera ran for only four performances, and is now obscure. Accompanied by his father, Liszt toured France and England, where he played for King George IV.Adam Liszt died suddenly of typhoid fever in the summer of 1827, and for the next eight years Liszt continued to live in Paris with his mother. He gave up touring, and in order to earn money, he gave lessons on piano and composition, often from early morning until late at night. His students were scattered across the city and he had to cover long distances. Because of this, he kept uncertain hours and also took up smoking and drinking, habits he would continue throughout his life. During this period Liszt fell in love with one of his pupils, Caroline de Saint-Cricq, the daughter of Charles X's minister of commerce, Pierre de Saint-Cricq. Her father, however, insisted that the affair be broken off.
Liszt fell very ill, to the extent that an obituary notice was printed in a Paris newspaper, and he underwent a long period of religious doubts and introspection. He stopped playing the piano and giving lessons, and developed an intense interest in religion, having many conversations with Abbé de Lamennais and Chrétien Urhan, a German-born violinist who introduced him to the Saint-Simonists. Lamennais dissuaded Liszt from becoming a monk or priest. Urhan was an early champion of Schubert, inspiring Liszt's own lifelong love of Schubert's songs. Much of Urhan's emotive music which moved beyond the Classical paradigm, such as Elle et moi, La Salvation angélique and Les Regrets, may have helped to develop Liszt's taste and style.
During this period Liszt came into contact with many of the leading authors and artists of his day, including Victor Hugo, Alphonse de Lamartine, George Sand and Alfred de Vigny. He composed practically nothing in the years between his father's death and the July Revolution of 1830, which inspired him to sketch a symphony based on the events of the "three glorious days". Liszt met Hector Berlioz on 4 December 1830, the day before the premiere of the Symphonie fantastique. Berlioz's music made a strong impression on Liszt, and the two quickly became friends. Liszt also befriended Frédéric Chopin around this time.
After attending a concert featuring Niccolò Paganini in April 1832, Liszt resolved to become as great a virtuoso on the piano as Paganini was on the violin. He dramatically increased his practice, sometimes practising for up to fourteen hours a day, and in 1838 published the six Études d'exécution transcendante d'après Paganini, aiming to represent Paganini's virtuosity on the keyboard. The process of Liszt completely redeveloping his technique is often described as a direct result of attending Paganini's concert, but it is likely that he had already begun this work previously, during the period 18281832.
Touring Europe
Affair with Countess Marie d'Agoult
In 1833, Liszt began a relationship with the Countess Marie d'Agoult, who was married to a French cavalry officer but living independently. In order to escape scandal they moved to Geneva in 1835; their daughter Blandine was born there on 18 December. Liszt taught at the newly founded Geneva Conservatoire and contributed essays for L'Artiste and the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris.For the next four years, Liszt and the countess lived together. In 1835 and 1836 they travelled around Switzerland, and from August 1837 until November 1839 they toured Italy. It was these travels that later inspired the composer to write his cycle of piano collections entitled Années de pèlerinage. Their daughter, Cosima, was born in Como on 24 December 1837, and their son Daniel on 9 May 1839 in Rome.
That autumn relations between them became strained. Liszt heard that plans for a Beethoven Monument in Bonn were in danger of collapse for lack of funds and pledged his support, raising funds through concerts. The countess returned to Paris with the children, while Liszt gave six concerts in Vienna, then toured Hungary. Liszt would later spend holidays with Marie and their children on the island of Nonnenwerth on the Rhine in the summers of 1841 and 1843. In May 1844, the couple finally separated.