Franz Liszt – Biography

Doborján, Raiding 1811 – Bayereut 1886

Liszt was the son of a steward in the service of the Esterházy family, patrons of Haydn. He was born in 1811 at Raiding in Hungary and moved as a child to Vienna, where he took piano lessons from Czerny and composition lessons from Salieri. Two years later, in 1823, he moved with his family to Paris, from where he toured widely as a pianist. Influenced by the phenomenal violinist Paganini, he turned his attention to the development of a similar technique as a pianist and in 1835 left Paris with his mistress, the Comtesse d’Agoult, with whom he travelled widely during the following years, as his reputation as a pianist of astonishing powers grew. In 1844 he separated from his mistress, the mother of his three children, and in 1848 settled in Weimar as Director of Music Extraordinary, accompanied by Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein and turning his attention now to composition and in particular to the creation of a new form, the symphonic poem. In 1861 Liszt moved to Rome, where he found expression for his long-held religious leanings. From 1869 he returned regularly to Weimar, where he had many pupils, and later he accepted similar obligations in Budapest, where he was regarded as a national hero. He died in Bayreuth in 1886, four years after the death of his son-in-law Wagner. As a pianist, he had no equal, and as a composer he suggested to a younger generation of musicians the new course that music was to take.

 

Orchestral Music
Liszt’s symphonic poems met strong criticism from champions of pure music, who took exception to his attempts to translate into musical terms the greatest works of literature. The best known of the symphonic poems are Ce qu’on entend sur la montagne, based on Victor Hugo, Les préludes, based on Lamartine, works based on Byron’s Tasso and Mazeppa, and Prometheus, with the so-called Faust Symphony in Three Character-Sketches after Goethe and the Symphony on Dante’s Divina commedia. Other Orchestral music include two episodes from Lenau’s Faust, the second the First Mephisto Waltz, to which a second was added twenty years later, in 1881. Liszt wrote two piano concertos, and, among other works for piano and orchestra, a Totentanz or Dance of Death and a Fantasy on Hungarian Folk-Melodies. Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodies, written for piano, have been effectively arranged for orchestra.

 

Piano Music
Liszt wrote a great deal of music for the piano, some of which was later revised, and consequently exists in a number of versions. In addition to original piano music, he also made many transcriptions of the work of other composers and wrote works based on national themes. The violinist Paganini was the immediate inspiration for the Etudes d’exécution transcendante d’après Paganini, dedicated to Clara Schumann, wife of the composer Robert Schumann, and based on five of the 24 Caprices for solo violin by Paganini and on the latter’s La campanella. The Transcendental Studies, revised in 1851, Etudes d’exécution transcendante, form a set of twelve pieces, including Wilde Jagd (a Wild Hunt), Harmonies du soir (Evening Harmony), and Chasse-Neige. The three collections, later given the title Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), wander from Switzerland, in the first book, to Italy in the second two, a series of evocative poetic pictures, inspired by landscape, poems and works of art. The earlier volumes stem from the years of wandering with Marie d’Agoult, and the last from the final period of Liszt’s life, based in Rome. The Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, written between 1845 and 1852, represent, in the ten pieces included, something of the composer’s lasting religious feelings, evident also in the Légendes of 1863, the first of the two representing St. Francis of Assisi preaching to the birds and the second St. Francis de Paul walking on the water. The remarkable Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, based on a theme from a Bach cantata, mourns the death of his elder daughter Blandine. His Fantasia and Fugue on the letters of the name of Bach – B flat – A – C & H (which is B natural in English notation) – was originally written for organ. Liszt wrote one sonata, novel in its form.

The Hungarian Rhapsodies, eventually appearing as a set of nineteen pieces, are based on a form of art music familiar in Hungary and fostered by gypsy musicians, although these works are not, as Liszt thought, a re-creation of true Hungarian folk- music. The Rhapsodie espagnole makes use of the well known La folia theme, used by Corelli and many other Baroque composers, and the jota aragonesa. Transcriptions of his own orchestral and choral compositions include a version of the second of his three Mephisto Waltzes, works that supported legends that had once dogged Paganini of diabolical assistance in performance. Of the many other transcriptions for piano those of the Beethoven Symphonies are among the most remarkable. There are a number of operatic transcriptions and fantasies, including Reminiscences de Don Juan, based on Mozart’s Don Giovanni, one of a number of bravura Piano music using themes from opera, that include a dozen or so based on the work of his friend and son-in-law Wagner.