Franz Liszt (may 1, 1811 – sep 1, 1886)

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Inspired by Paganini, the pianist Franz Liszt made unprecedented breakthroughs in keyboard technique. His many piano compositions include concert etudes, character pieces, and works in a self-consciously Hungarian style. He also promoted other composers' music through hundreds of arrangements of symphonies, opera excerpts, and songs. In 1848, Liszt became conductor of the court orchestra in Weimar and produced a series of larger works, including symphonic poems.

Style brillant

Also dabbled in Revolutionary Politics: "Art. as he wished to practice it, would be an instrument of social transformation. The virtuoso would become a sublime, rousing publica orator on behalf of social progress. While it cannot be said that Liszt often played such a role in life, despite the many charity concerts he gave and other acts of personal generosity, his imagining it is alkready powerful testimony to the new status and concept of musical virtuosity.


Liszt's professional relationships were also extraordinary over his long career, making him a musical ambassador of sorts between and among generations. He probably had contact with more prominent musicians than ahy other figure discussed in this book. As a boy, he met Beethoven and by the end of his life the young French composer Claude Debussy. In between he encountered nearly every significant compsoer and performer of his century, some of whom were his students or disciples. The most important reflection of these varied relationships was his generous advocacy of composers from all countries, some of whom held vastly different aesthetic and musical positions than his own.


Made lotsa arrangements and transcritions of stuff, to much freer adaptations known as "Fantasy"and "paraphrase".

Liszt considered Schubert "The most poetitc musician who ever lived", and was eventually the central figure in the mid-nineteenth century reception of Schubert, i.e. Liszt's piano transcription of Erlkonig.

Lisztomania, which was a term coined by Heinrich Heine.

First traveling virtuoso to have an impresario, or manager.


Using his status as Kapelmeister, Liszt placed himself at the service of the most advanced, formidable, and politically risky composers of the time, aprticualrly Wagner, then a political exile from Germany. In 1850, he gave the widely acclaimed premier of Wagner's opera Lohengrin (which is dedicated to him) as well as notable productions of other operas.

In general he wrote far less for the piano and turned to the orchestra he now led as his medium of choice. Because he had little training and experience as an orchestrator, he initially made use of assistants, but in time he became a master of orchestration in his own right.

Liszt eventually called the works that he produced in this new style Symphonische Dichtungen (symphonic poem), a telling echo of the Hegelian ideal of ünity of the poetic and the musical." Brendel praised these pieces as "the summit of thinking"and considered them a new synthesis, a transcendence giving rise to a new thesis---a new dawn--for music: Ït is the unity of the poetic and the musical, and the essential novelty in these artistic creations."With

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