Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt was a charismatic showman with a deeply spiritual personality. A spellbinding virtuoso who harboured serious musical ambitions, his musical output ranged from dazzling showpieces to experimental works that continue to challenge audiences today. Few other musicians have led such complex lives, earned such spectacular and contradictory reputations, or left such an influential body of work. Liszt showed early promise and made his concerto debut at the age of nine. Moving to Vienna a year later for 14 months to study under the composer, pianist, and former Beethoven pupil Carl Czerny, he gained a thorough grounding in piano technique, memorisation, and sight-reading, skills for which he would later become legendary. By his early 20s, Liszt was surrounded by the leading lights of Romanticism, personally acquainted with Hector Berlioz, Frédéric Chopin, Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, Eugène Delacroix and many others. The most decisive influence, however, came from the violinist Nicolò Paganini, who conveyed cathartic expression through his extraordinary technical skills and magnetic stage manner. Paganini’s example inspired Liszt to push piano technique through previously unimagined difficulties and intricacies to attain new brilliance and sonorities. His quest was also aided by the improved capabilities of the Érard pianos that he played. Stories circulated about the special aura that he had when performing and he was the first to offer piano ‘recitals’, concerts in a large hall featuring only solo piano. His performances were based, in part, on dazzling showmanship and stunning displays of technical prowess, but he made his greatest impression by invoking an expressive world, encompassing everything from agony to ecstasy. His physical movements and facial expressions were crucial to this effect. In 1848, Liszt became Kapellmeister at Weimar, where he wrote and premiered most of his symphonic poems and the Sonata in B minor. He also championed the music of Berlioz and Wagner, fellow members of the so-called ‘New German School’ that favoured programme music over traditional, abstract forms. After leaving Weimar in 1861, Liszt became an Abbot in the Roman Catholic Church and spent the last decades of his life moving between Rome, Budapest and Weimar, composing and teaching extensively. Liszt’s music is among the most flamboyant of the 19th century. Many of his works exist in multiple versions, demonstrating his rhapsodic approach both to performance and composition. His Études, such as the Paganini Études and Transcendental Études, extended piano technique beyond what had previously been thought possible and his wider piano works are brilliant showpieces, requiring both technical skill and expressivity. But Liszt is not all glamour and glitz. Many of his works in Années de Pèlerinage and Harmonies poétiques et religieuses are primarily reflective. His late piano works remain challenging and enigmatic listening experiences, their melodies fragmentary, their textures spare, and their harmonies ambiguous.