His symphonic poem Hungaria was a musical reply to an ode dedicated to him by the poet Mihály Vörösmarty (1800–1855). The Hungarian rhapsodies, the Hungarian fantasy, the Rákóczi march, and many verbunkos-themed pieces expressed his Hungarian self-identification musically. Though he had never learned Hungarian, he was interested in Hungarian culture and supported the national cause on every platform. When the Danube flooded Pest in 1838, Liszt gave a series of benefit concerts for the reconstruction of the city, and rediscovered his attachment to his native country. He toured Europe tirelessly from London to St Petersburg and from Copenhagen to Trieste he was the first virtuoso musician to have a personal agent who managed his concerts, kept up with his personal and professional correspondence, and negotiated his fees. At a time when musical scores were seen as canonized sacred texts, such improvisation and spontaneity was a daring but essential feature of Liszt’s recitals, which were, nonetheless, carefully staged pieces of showmanship. Liszt often dared to improvise freely when he played standard repertoire pieces. Virtuosity and programme music were the typical aspects of Liszt’s trade. He took the European concert halls by storm his recitals were so popular that Heinrich Heine coined the term Lisztomania to describe the rapture evoked by Liszt’s presence in the concert halls. Liszt began transcribing Beethoven’s symphonies in the 1830s and finished them in 1860s. He based these on the works of the most famous opera composers of his time, and his piano arrangements helped disseminate and popularize the symphonic work of Schubert, Berlioz, and Wagner. Liszt revolutionized concert life with his transcriptions and free fantasies or paraphrases. Their daughter Cosima would later abandon her husband Hans von Bülow for Richard Wagner (1813–1883). In 1835 he began a long-term turbulent relationship with Countess Marie d’Agoult, with whom he had three children. Periods of retreat and reflection alternated with months of intense musical tours and social life (including numerous eyebrow-raising love affairs). When he was not teaching, composing, or giving concerts, he spent his time reading philosophy and literature and writing essays about music and aesthetics. Here Liszt became the darling of the salons, and befriended luminaries such as George Sand (1804–1876), Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849), and Hector Berlioz (1803–1869). Life as a child prodigy wearied him he found solace in religion and seriously considered becoming a Catholic priest, until his father’s death left him, at age seventeen, to provide for his widowed mother, with whom he moved to Paris. Denied enrolment in the Paris Conservatoire in 1823, he continued his Vienna training and concert tours. On this European tour, Liszt, as a child prodigy, mainly performed his own piano transcriptions from famous operas and dazzled the audience with his piano technique and virtuosity. A second performance, years later, at Esterházy’s other palace in Bratislava (Pozsony/Pressburg), impressed the wealthy aristocrat enough to earn Liszt a sponsorship enabling his studies with prominent musicians in Vienna: Beethoven’s disciple Carl Czerny and Mozart’s contemporary and rival Antonio Salieri.Īt his coming-out concert in Pest in 1823, he performed the Rakóczi March and other verbunkos transcriptions in a gesture to the rising national awareness of the Hungarian public, whose attendance had been canvassed with the advertisement “Esteemed Public! I am Hungarian and I can think of no greater happiness than to offer the first fruits of my education and erudition to the public of my homeland before embarking on a tour of France and England”. At the age of eight, Liszt performed a piano recital for his father’s employer, Count Esterházy. He achieved fame as one of the first musical celebrities of his time, and later came to be seen as a quintessential figure of European Romantic Nationalism.īorn to a German (Swabian) family in 1811 in Doborján (present-day Raiding, Austria, then in the county of Sopron, western Hungary), Liszt began his musical education with his father, who, like Ferenc Erkel’s father, was both a musician and an estate administrator. Franz Liszt, virtuoso pianist and internationally renowned composer, revolutionized 19th-century concert practice and the music trade with his bohemian attitude towards art and politics.
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