Franz Liszt

Hungarian composer

• Born: October 22, 1811
• Birthplace: Raiding, Hungary
• Died: July 31, 1886
• Place of death: Bayreuth, Germany

Liszt revolutionized the art of piano playing and established the vogue of the recitalist. As a composer, he attempted to reconcile the trends of French and German Romanticism, created the musical genre of the symphonic poem, founded new innovations in harmony and form, and in his late works anticipated many devices of twentieth century music.

Early Life

Franz Liszt (lihst) was the son of Ádám Liszt, a clerk in the service of Prince Nikolaus Esterházy, the Hungarian noble family that had supported Joseph Haydn. An amateur cellist, the elder Liszt played in orchestras under Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven and was his son’s first teacher in piano.

Young Liszt showed phenomenal gifts for music as a child and began to study piano in his sixth year. His debut concerts in Sopron and Bratislava at the age of nine enabled him to acquire the support of several Hungarian nobles to finance his musical studies in Vienna under Karl Czerny and Antonio Salieri. Liszt soon acquired a reputation as a formidable sight reader. He published his first composition, a variation on a waltz by Anton Diabelli, in 1822, and in the following year made his debut in Vienna. The often-repeated story that Beethoven attended the concert and kissed the boy afterward cannot be proved, but it is certain that Liszt met Beethoven at his apartment and forever cherished the meeting.

Liszt continued his musical education in Paris. Denied admission to the Paris Conservatory because of his foreign citizenship, he studied privately with Anton Reicha and Ferdinando Paer. In 1824, he began his concert tours of England; until 1847, he was best known as a virtuoso pianist who revolutionized the art of playing that instrument and who was a pioneer in giving solo recitals performed from memory; he even invented the term “recital,” to describe his solo programs in London in 1840.

The death of his father in 1826 and the rejection of his suit of Caroline de Saint-Cricq by her noble family brought about a period of depression when he contemplated entering the priesthood. During the early 1830’s, he came under the influence of the Saint-Simonian movement and the liberal Catholicism of the Abbé Hughes-Félicité-Robert de Lamennais; both placed art in a central place in society. Liszt’s first mature compositions, the Apparitions (1834), were written under Lamennais’s influence, whereas his piano piece Lyon was influenced by a silk-weavers’ strike there in 1834.

Life’s Work

Liszt compensated for his lack of formal education by extensive reading and by seeking the company of writers. He was introduced to the Countess Marie d’Agoult, of German descent, who left her husband and children in 1835 to live with Liszt in Switzerland and Italy. The musical results of the sojourn were the first two volumes of the Années de pèlerinage (1835-1877; years of pilgrimage), featuring, in the first volume, nature scenes in Switzerland and, in the second, the art and literature of Italy. D’Agoult guided Liszt in his reading and interested him in the visual arts. They had three children. Blandine and Daniel died while in their twenties, but Cosima lived until 1930, to become the wife first of the pianist-conductor Hans von Bülow and then of the composer Richard Wagner.

Liszt’s decision to return to concert playing in 1839 placed a strain on his relationship with d’Agoult, which ended in 1844 during a hectic period of concertizing all over Europe, performing as far afield as Portugal, Ireland, and Turkey, traveling under primitive conditions, and being subject to the kind of adulation given to modern rock stars. The main works of this period were his songs for voice and piano (highly expressive and unjustly neglected) and his opera paraphrases and transcriptions for the piano. The transcriptions are reproductions of the vocal music, but the paraphrases are virtual recompositions of the opera based on its main tunes; the most famous of these is the Réminiscences de Don Juan (1841), based on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (1787). During his tours of Hungary, he was able to hear authentic Gypsy music and re-created these sounds in his Hungarian Rhapsodies (1839-1847).

On his last concert tour in 1847, he met in Poland the Princess Carolyne de Sayn-Wittgenstein, with whom he began a lengthy relationship; because the czar of Russia would not grant her a divorce, she could not marry Liszt but was able to flee Russia with most of her money. Liszt, in turn, accepted an offer to become musical director of the court at Weimar and was able to abandon his career as a touring piano virtuoso in 1847 to devote himself to musical composition. He and Carolyne moved there during the following year.

During Liszt’s thirteen years in Weimar, he revised most of his earlier compositions for publication and embarked on many ambitious musical projects that he had sketched earlier, such as his two piano concerti. During these years, Liszt invented the symphonic poem, an extended programmatic work for orchestra. His first two works in this genre, the so-called Mountain Symphony (begun 1848) and Tasso (begun 1849-1854), required assistance from others as Liszt was learning how to write for orchestra, but the next work, Les Préludes (1854), his best-known symphonic poem, shows his complete mastery of both form and instrumentation.

Among the best of Liszt’s remaining nine works are Orpheus (1853-1854) and Hamlet (1858). The culmination of his orchestral works is his monumental A Faust Symphony (1854-1861), comprising three movements, character portrayals of the three main personages in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s drama: Faust, Gretchen, and Mephistopheles. The less conventional A Symphony to Dante’s “Divina Commedia” (1855-1856) was originally intended to accompany a stage performance with dioramas and does not follow normal symphonic form. A work of “absolute music” without an overt program is the Sonata in B Minor (1852-1853) for piano, the culmination of Liszt’s experiments in harmony, form, and the construction of a large-scale work from a few ideas that are extensively developed and transformed.

While in Weimar, Liszt continued his altruistic gestures that got the music of his contemporaries performed. Earlier he had played the large piano works of Robert Schumann and Frédéric Chopin when their composers were physically unable to do so, and widened the audience for Beethoven’s symphonies and Schubert’s songs by arranging them for the piano. Now he devoted his energies to organizing and conducting performances of the operas of Richard Wagner, who was in exile in Switzerland after his participation in the abortive revolt in Dresden in 1849. Though Liszt had abandoned concertizing except for benefits and charities, he had a large number of piano students whom he taught without charge, and a coterie of ardent musical disciples. Disappointed at the lack of support he was receiving in Weimar from the new grand duke, who preferred the theater to music, Liszt resigned as musical director in 1858 and made it effective after a music festival in 1861, when he moved to Rome to join Carolyne.

The wedding of Liszt and Carolyne was to have taken place on Liszt’s fiftieth birthday, but it was abruptly canceled; the reasons have yet to be revealed. Shortly thereafter, Liszt took the initial steps toward entering the priesthood; though he dressed in clerical clothes and was known as “Abbé Liszt,” he did not complete the final stages of holy orders and thus could not say Mass or hear confessions. Not until 1865 was his entry into the religious life generally known. During this period, he wrote principally religious music, especially choral works such as the Missa Choralis (1865); two large oratorios, Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth (1857-1862) and Christus (1855-1866); the “Legends” for piano (1863); and the Totentanz (1849, revised 1853, 1859; dance of death) for piano and orchestra, a paraphrase of the Dies Irae (day of wrath) chant from the Requiem Mass.

In 1869, Liszt was reconciled with the Grand Duke of Weimar and began his vie trifurquée (three-pronged life) between Rome, Weimar, and Budapest. The third book of his Années de pèlerinage reflects his journeys, especially to Rome and Hungary. The best known of the works in this set is “The Fountains of the Villa d’Este” in Rome, where Liszt often stayed; this piece anticipates many of the impressionistic harmonic and coloristic effects of Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel.

In Weimar and Budapest, Liszt held master classes in which he trained a new generation of pianists. His style of composition also changed to a spare, attenuated style, avoiding extensive developments or repetitions and using often unusual harmonic sonorities that he treated in unconventional ways. Many of these last pieces are extremely short, beginning and ending abruptly, without the extensive introductions or closes of his Weimar works. Publishers rejected these compositions, nearly all of which were published long after Liszt’s death. Best known of these late works are the short piano pieces, such as “Unstern” (evil star) and “Nuages gris” (gray clouds) from the 1880’s, and the Via Crucis (1879; the way of the cross) for chorus and organ.

Liszt’s death in 1886 came, after an extensive tour of Belgium and England, in Bayreuth, Germany, where he had attended a festival of operas by his son-in-law Richard Wagner. The cause of death was pneumonia; he had earlier suffered from edema.

Significance

Franz Liszt was a man of immense personal magnetism and charisma, as attested by the immense acclaim he received during his years as a virtuoso and reflected in later years during his charity concerts and appearances as a conductor. He attracted a devoted coterie of students, and though he failed to found a school of composition, he influenced virtually every composer of the second half of the nineteenth century and anticipated many of the devices and techniques of the twentieth.

A man of formidable energy, he composed about thirteen hundred works. He was one of the leading letter writers of the century, and, though he did not write the many books and essays attributed to him, he dictated their ideas, edited the text, and assumed responsibility for their final form. If one had to choose a single composer whose works sum up the nineteenth century’s achievements, innovations, and also weaknesses, Liszt would be the most likely candidate.

Bibliography

Arnold, Ben, ed. The Liszt Companion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000. Collection of essays, including scholarly discussions of Liszt’s life, writings and correspondence, reception, and analyses of the various types of music that he composed.

Fay, Amy. Music-Study in Germany. Chicago: Jansen, McClurg, 1881. Reprint. New York: Dover, 1965. This engagingly written firsthand account of Liszt’s teaching in Weimar was written by one of his few American pupils; her study also gives an incisive view of Germany shortly after unification.

László, Zsigmond, and Béla Mátéka. Franz Liszt: A Biography in Pictures. London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1968. This series of pictures and facsimiles of manuscripts and documents is arranged to provide a chronological account of Liszt’s life, achievements, and circle of friends and students. An extensive commentary explains and connects the various illustrations.

Longyear, Rey M. “Ferenc (Franz) Liszt.” In Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music. 3d ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1988. A brief survey of Liszt’s musical style, emphasizing the Weimar and late works, which relates Liszt’s music to that of the century as a whole. Liszt is also presented as a seminal composer for the twentieth century.

Merrick, Paul. Revolution and Religion in the Music of Liszt. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1987. This interesting and controversial study emphasizes Liszt’s music with religious import, particularly the choral works; the author tends to overstate his case in seeking hidden religious programs in some of the instrumental works.

Samson, Jim. Virtuosity and the Musical Work: The Transcendental Studies of Liszt. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Focuses on three sets of etudes by Liszt, the first composed in 1826, with subsequent reworkings in 1837 and 1851. Samson describes how these compositions exemplify many of the characteristics of early Romantic era music, including the relationship of composer and performer, the concept of virtuosity, and the significance of recomposition.

Searle, Humphrey. The Music of Liszt. London: Williams & Norgate, 1954. A still-valuable survey of this prolific composer’s works. Not too technically oriented for the person with limited musical background. Searle’s book was a landmark in restoring Liszt’s works to musical respectability after decades of neglect and disdain.

Searle, Humphrey, and Sharon Winklhofer. “Franz Liszt.” In The New Grove Early Romantic Masters I: Chopin, Schumann and Liszt, edited by Nicholas Temperley. New York: W. W. Norton, 1985. A concise study, balanced between Liszt’s life and his music, derived from Searle’s article in The New Grove and revised by Sharon Winklhofer. The list of Liszt’s approximately thirteen hundred compositions is particularly valuable.

Walker, Alan. The Virtuoso Years, 1811-1847. Vol. 1 in Franz Liszt. Rev. ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Weimar Years, 1848-1861. Vol. 2 in Franz Liszt. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. Walker’s two-volume study is the most complete biography of Liszt. Though the focus is on his biography, some often insightful discussion is given to his music. Volume 2 provides the definitive account of his most productive years and shows Liszt not only as the musical director at Weimar but also as a composer, teacher, administrator, and writer on music.

Watson, Derek. Liszt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Carefully researched biography, describing Liszt’s life, work, and influence. Includes numerous musical examples, a detailed chronology, a list of compositions, and photographs.