Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt was the greatest piano virtuoso of his age, perhaps of any age. Born in Hungary in 1811, he was a child prodigy who studied with Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny and the court composer Antonio Salieri in Vienna. By his twenties, he had invented the modern piano recital and toured Europe amid a public hysteria that the poet Heinrich Heine dubbed “Lisztomania.”

Yet Liszt was far more than a showman. In 1848, he abandoned his touring career to become musical director at the Weimar court, where he championed the revolutionary music of Wagner and Berlioz, premiered Lohengrin, and invented the symphonic poem, the extended orchestral work that tells a story. His circle included the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow, who married Liszt’s daughter Cosima. Later in life, he took minor orders in the Catholic Church and composed visionary late works that anticipate the harmonic language of the twentieth century.

Liszt and Johannes Brahms stood in opposing camps in the “War of the Romantics”: Liszt led the progressive “New German School” alongside Wagner, while Brahms was claimed by the defenders of classical forms and absolute music.