FranzLiszt

Writing from Albano in June 1839, Liszt told Princess Cristina Belgiojoso about the concerts he had been giving alone in Rome. No singer came on between his pieces, and no other soloist shared the bill. He played his transcription of the William Tell Overture, fantasies on opera tunes, studies and improvisations. Between numbers he talked to the audience. “The concert is me,” he joked.

1811–⁠32The pupil

His father Adam had begun the piano lessons in Doborján, a German-speaking village in the Kingdom of Hungary, where he worked on an Esterházy estate. Liszt always counted Hungary as his homeland, though the languages he used most easily were German and French. The family went to Vienna in 1822. Carl Czerny, a former pupil of Beethoven, taught him piano, and Antonio Salieri taught him composition. In 1823 the family moved to Paris, where the Conservatoire refused to admit a foreigner. He continued his education with private lessons, including work with Anton Reicha.

Adam died in 1827, and the fifteen-year-old had to earn a living by teaching in Paris. His mother joined him there. As he grew older, books and conversation took up more of his time beside the keyboard. Victor Hugo and the priest and social thinker Félicité de Lamennais belonged to his circle, as did Chopin and Berlioz. He read widely. In 1832 he heard Paganini, and he returned to the piano with a new conception of what a performer might do.

On 2 May that year he wrote to the pianist Pierre Wolff: “For a fortnight my mind and fingers have been working like two damned souls.” He practised thirds, sixths, octaves, tremolos and repeated notes for four or five hours a day, with Bach and Beethoven among the scores on his desk. His transcription of the Symphonie fantastique, published in 1834, was an attempt to reduce Berlioz’s orchestra to two staves while keeping its inner voices.

Switzerland and ItalyMarie d’Agoult and Années de pèlerinage

In 1835 he left Paris with the married Countess Marie d’Agoult. They lived in Switzerland and Italy, and had three children: Blandine, Cosima and Daniel. Landscapes, reading and visits to works of art from these years went into what became Années de pèlerinage. The pieces of the Swiss book take as their subjects a chapel, lakes and a spring. Its longest piece, Vallée d’Obermann, takes its name from Senancour’s novel and is built on a descending phrase that returns many times.

1839–⁠47Liszt’s concert tours

During the great touring years Liszt’s face became as familiar as his music. He played from memory and helped establish the solo recital. Opera supplied material that an audience could recognise before he began transforming it. The Réminiscences de Don Juan uses the Commendatore’s music; the seduction duet receives elaborate variations, and the Champagne Aria drives the finish. The parts of Mozart’s singers, together with the basses and orchestral flourishes, are given to one pianist.

WeimarSymphonic poems and the Sonata

He stopped regular paid touring in 1847 and settled in Weimar in 1848 with Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-⁠Wittgenstein. As conductor of the court orchestra he could try out new works and revise his own. In 1850 he conducted the première of Wagner’s Lohengrin; Wagner, in exile, could not attend. The symphonic poems, the Faust and Dante symphonies, and the B minor Sonata belong to these years. Assistants helped him prepare orchestral scores, which he continued to alter in rehearsal.

A symphonic poem could take its starting point from a picture, a poem or a historical figure. Les Préludes began as an overture connected with Joseph Autran’s poems; the link to Lamartine came later. Its opening idea becomes a broad melody or a march as Liszt changes the rhythm and accompaniment. In the Faust Symphony, Mephistopheles distorts Faust’s own themes into caricatures.

The B minor Sonata, completed in 1853 and dedicated to Schumann, performs its transformations without a stated literary programme. The repeated notes hammered out near the beginning, at bar 13, become a melody marked cantando espressivo at bar 153. A slow movement and a fugato fit inside the continuous span, and the early themes return in new forms. Hans von Bülow gave the first public performance in Berlin in 1857. Liszt had replaced his original loud ending with a quiet B major close.

Young musicians also came to Weimar to learn from him. His masterclasses in later life were free, and his generosity extended to composers whose works he conducted, arranged or recommended to publishers. His advocacy of programme music put him at the centre of the “New German School”. Arguments with the circle around Brahms could make the musical press resemble a quarrel between political parties.

Rome, Weimar, BudapestThe abbé

Liszt’s later piano pieces are spare. In Nuages gris, written in 1881, a short melody repeats over low tremolos, and the piece ends on augmented chords without resolving. La lugubre gondola grew out of his stay in Venice before Wagner’s death; it takes the rocking motion of the boat and turns it towards a funeral. In the Bagatelle sans tonalité the quick dance figures never settle in a secure home key.

Liszt continued teaching and travelling as his eyesight and health failed. In July 1886 he went to Bayreuth, where Cosima, now Wagner’s widow, was running the festival. He attended Parsifal and Tristan und Isolde. On 31 July he died, aged seventy-four.