🇭🇺Franz
Liszt

In the winter of 1841–42, Franz Liszt performed a series of concerts in Berlin that produced scenes of collective hysteria that had no precedent in the history of music and arguably have no equal since. Women fought over his gloves, his handkerchiefs, his broken piano strings, which they wore as bracelets or kept in lockets. His arrival in cities was treated as a state occasion. The term coined by the German poet Heinrich Heine for this phenomenon — Lisztomania — entered the language and remains there, available to describe any similar outbreak of mass devotion to a performing artist. Liszt was tall, dramatically handsome, wore his hair long, played standing — he introduced the now-universal practice of turning the piano sideways so the audience could see his face and hands — and performed with a physical intensity that audiences had simply never encountered before. He was also, by any technical measure, playing music that no other living pianist could play. The fact that he was also composing works of genuine harmonic originality that would influence musicians for the next century was almost beside the point, in concert. But it was not beside the point in history.

Franz Liszt was born on October 22, 1811, in Doborján, in the Kingdom of Hungary, the son of Adam Liszt, a steward in the service of the Esterházy family — the same aristocratic family that had employed Haydn for three decades. Adam was an enthusiastic amateur musician who recognized his son's gifts early and devoted himself entirely to Franz's development. At nine, Franz gave his first public concert; two local noblemen were so impressed they funded his musical education in Vienna. He studied piano under Carl Czerny — who had been a student of Beethoven — and composition under Antonio Salieri. In 1823 he traveled to Paris, where Cherubini refused to admit him to the Conservatoire because he was foreign, and he was thereafter taught privately. He performed for Charles X and, according to an account that may be apocryphal but has never been definitively disproved, for Beethoven himself, who kissed him on the forehead after a performance. He was twelve years old. The "kiss of Beethoven" became one of the foundational stories of his self-presentation as an artist.

The 1830s transformed Liszt. In Paris he encountered Paganini — the violin virtuoso who seemed to be playing notes that were physically impossible — and decided that he would do for the piano what Paganini had done for the violin. He withdrew from public life for a period and practiced with an intensity that his contemporaries described as frightening. He emerged playing music that was technically impossible by the standards of what had previously been imagined as piano technique: octave passages at speeds no one had approached, leaps across the full range of the keyboard executed with perfect accuracy, simultaneous melodic, harmonic, and bass voices requiring the two hands to function as four, trills maintained in one hand while the other played extended passages. He also fell in love with the Countess Marie d'Agoult, with whom he had three children, one of whom — Cosima — would later marry Richard Wagner, making Liszt Wagner's father-in-law and creating one of the defining musical dynasties of the nineteenth century.

In 1839 he invented the solo piano recital. Before Liszt, concerts were variety programs: a pianist would perform, then singers would sing, then perhaps a chamber ensemble would play, then the pianist would return for one or two more pieces. Liszt simply appeared alone on stage and played for two hours. He called the format "musical soliloquies." The form he created — one performer, one instrument, an evening's complete program — is now the standard format for solo classical performance worldwide. He also invented the practice of playing from memory, rather than from sheet music, which has since become universal. The term "recital" itself was coined for him by a London newspaper in 1840. These seem like secondary matters compared to composition, but they transformed how music is experienced by audiences, and those transformations are permanent.

As a composer, Liszt's most significant innovations came in two areas. First, he invented the symphonic poem — a single-movement orchestral work that follows a narrative or literary program — of which he wrote thirteen, including Les Préludes, Hamlet, and Orpheus. This form directly inspired Strauss's tone poems (Don Juan, Also sprach Zarathustra, Death and Transfiguration), Smetana's Má vlast, Sibelius's Finlandia, and the entire tradition of programmatic orchestral music in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Second, his late piano works — composed from the 1870s onward when he was in his sixties and taking holy orders — pushed harmonic language so far from conventional tonality that they anticipated Debussy, Bartók, and even Schoenberg. A piece like the Bagatelle sans tonalité of 1885 has no discernible key center whatsoever and sounds more like 1920 than 1885. His harmonic imagination outlasted the conventions of his era by thirty to forty years.

After retiring from the concert stage in 1847, Liszt devoted himself to conducting and teaching. He became the most sought-after piano teacher in the world and taught without charge — anyone who was talented enough could study with him, and the list of his students constitutes a roster of the most important pianists of the late nineteenth century: Hans von Bülow, Carl Tausig, Emil von Sauer, Moritz Rosenthal, Eugen d'Albert, and eventually Ferruccio Busoni, who transmitted Liszt's tradition to the twentieth century. In 1865 he took minor orders in the Catholic Church, becoming the Abbé Liszt, and spent the rest of his life moving between Rome, Weimar, and Budapest in a pattern he called his "vie trifurquée" — his three-forked life. He died in Bayreuth in 1886, during the Wagner Festival, aged seventy-four. He had done enough for three careers and outlived the era that had made him famous, composing quietly into a musical future that the world would not catch up to for another generation.