Franz Liszt
(1811-1886)
A Romantic icon and one of
the first proponents of the orchestral tone poem, Franz Liszt was
an unparalleled keyboard virtuoso and a supremely talented and
innovative composer. He was also renowned as a mercurial
personality and bandit of love; in short, like the flamboyant
violinist Niccolo Paganini, Liszt lived the Romantic ideal to the
hilt.
He was born in Hungary in 1811, and began to study the piano at
the age of six. He exhibited unusual talent on the instrument,
and gave a number of successful concerts while still a child.
After continuing his piano studies with the help of Hungarian
nobility, he moved with his family to Vienna, where he studied
with Carl Czerny and the now-infamous Antonio Salieri. He made
more concert appearances, and audiences took to his passionate
and technically immaculate playing. Next was Paris, where, at the
age of 16, he decided to take up long-term residence.
Liszt's fame as a piano virtuoso grew; in 1831 he was lucky
enough to see the violinist Paganini in performance, and that
experience (Paganini's gifts on the violin were so breathtaking
that many people believed he was in league with the devil) made a
profound impact on the young pianist; he resolved to apply
Paganini's showmanship and pyrotechnics to the piano, and in so
doing revolutionized the piano as a virtuosic instrument.
Liszt's life reads a bit like a chapter out of Don Juan.
Flamboyant in dress and manner, he carried out innummerable minor
love affairs and two major ones - first with the Countess Marie
d'Agoult, and later with the Princess Carolyne von
Sayn-Wittgenstein, who worked with him while he was Court Music
Director at Weimar. At the age of 48, after living the high life
for three decades, he suddenly entered the priesthood, thereafter
splitting his musical activities between Rome, Weimar and
Budapest; he was conferred the religious title of Abbé in 1866
by Pope Pius IX. Wherever he went, even in later years, he was
surrounded by throngs of admirers, imitators and hangers-on.
One might think that all of this adulation and
personality-worship would color Liszt's approach to the music
that had vaulted him to such overwhelming fame. But this never
happened; rather, Liszt always adhered strictly to his core
musical values, and considered the directions of the composer the
ultimate authority in interpretation. He revered composers from
Beethoven to Berlioz to Wagner, and always tried to expand upon
their work to create new musical forms. And he succeeded...his
transcriptions of orchestral works for the piano (Schumann's
Widmung, Verdi's Rigoletto and Aida, Beethoven's symphonies and
Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique are only a few) led to a
completely new style of piano composition, and his orchestral
tone poems, written mostly during his stint at Weimar, are
revolutionary in their use of harmonic progression and
programmatic elements.
Liszt is perhaps best-known, however, for his piano music, and
much of it is utterly magnificent. His monumental one-movement
Sonata in B minor (1853) is one of the masterpieces of
instrumental solo music, and his numerous tone poems, showpieces
and smaller works for piano are brilliant examples of a restless,
Romantic imagination, informed but quite removed from the rigor
of Classical forms.