Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt was the most famous musician alive for most of the nineteenth century, and he very nearly invented the role he filled. The solo piano recital, the performer who plays a whole evening alone and from memory, the piano turned sideways so the audience sees the player’s profile and the raised lid throws the sound into the hall, the touring virtuoso as a figure of public hysteria — all of these are, in their modern form, Liszt’s doing. He was also a composer of radical originality whose late music reached the edge of tonality forty years early, a conductor who premiered Wagner’s Lohengrin, the most generous patron of his profession, and, at the end, a man in minor holy orders who divided each year between Rome, Weimar and Budapest.

He was born on 22 October 1811 at Raiding — Hungarian Doborján — a village then in the Kingdom of Hungary, within the Austrian Empire, on land belonging to the Esterházy princes. His father Adam Liszt was a steward in the Esterházy administration and a capable amateur cellist who had played in the court orchestra at Eisenstadt in the last years of Haydn’s establishment there. The household spoke German; Franz never learned to speak Hungarian fluently, a fact that did nothing to dim either his lifelong Hungarian self-identification or Hungary’s claim on him.

The boy’s gift was obvious and early. He gave his first public concerts in the Hungarian towns of Sopron and Pressburg (Bratislava) in 1820, at eight and nine, and a group of Hungarian magnates was so impressed that they clubbed together to fund a six-year stipend for his musical education. The family moved to Vienna in 1822, where Franz studied piano with Carl Czerny — himself a pupil of Beethoven — who was so struck by the child that he taught him without a fee. Theory and composition he took from Antonio Salieri, by then the elderly court Kapellmeister.

It is from these Vienna years that the most famous Liszt legend dates: the Weihekuss, the “consecration kiss,” in which a deaf and ageing Beethoven is said to have climbed onto the stage after a concert in April 1823 and kissed the eleven-year-old on the forehead. Liszt told the story, with growing detail, for the rest of his life and treated it as the anointing of his vocation. Scholars have never been able to confirm that Beethoven was even present; the most that can be honestly said is that Liszt believed it, or needed to.

Paris, Paganini, and the remaking of technique

In 1823 the family moved on to Paris, the centre of the musical world. There Liszt met the one institutional rebuff of his career: Luigi Cherubini, director of the Conservatoire, refused him admission because he was a foreigner, the statutes barring non-French students. Liszt never held a conservatoire diploma. He studied privately instead — composition with Anton Reicha and the opera composer Ferdinando Paër — and was launched into the Paris salons as a prodigy. When his father died at Boulogne in 1827, the teenaged Liszt supported himself and his mother by teaching, fell into a long religious and emotional crisis, and for a time considered entering the priesthood.

What pulled him out was the artistic ferment of Paris around 1830: the July Revolution, the friendship of Hector Berlioz (whose Symphonie fantastique Liszt heard at its 1830 premiere and promptly transcribed for piano), the company of Frédéric Chopin, and, decisively, the violin. In 1832 Liszt heard Niccolò Paganini play in Paris and was thunderstruck. Paganini had made the violin do things no one believed possible and had built a legend around the feat; Liszt set himself to do the same for the piano. The wave of studies that followed — the Étude en douze exercices reworked into the Grandes études and finally the Études d’exécution transcendante — pushed piano technique into territory that defined virtuosity for a century.

The other great event of the decade was personal. Around 1833 Liszt began a relationship with the Countess Marie d’Agoult, a married aristocrat and writer who left her husband to live with him. Between 1835 and 1839 they travelled and lived in Switzerland and Italy, and had three children: Blandine, Cosima — born at Como in 1837, later the wife first of the conductor Hans von Bülow and then of Wagner — and Daniel. The landscapes and pictures and books of those years became the first two volumes of the Années de pèlerinage (“Years of Pilgrimage”), among the most personal travel-diaries any composer has left.

The Glanzzeit and “Lisztomania”

From 1839 to 1847 Liszt toured incessantly — from Ireland to the Russian interior, from Lisbon to Constantinople — in a campaign of concert-giving without precedent in scale. It was during this Glanzzeit, his “time of brilliance,” that he settled the conventions of the modern concert. His London concerts of 1840 were the first to be advertised as “recitals”, a coinage that puzzled the critics (“How can one recite upon the piano?”). He played entire programmes alone, without supporting artists; he played from memory, then a novelty bordering on arrogance; and he placed the instrument sideways to the hall. The audiences responded with a frenzy the poet Heinrich Heine, reporting from Paris in 1844, named “Lisztomania” — and described, half-admiring and half-appalled, as a kind of contagious medical hysteria.

When Liszt appeared, the hall fell into a sort of madness. Women fought over his green gloves and the broken strings of his piano; they pressed forward not to hear music so much as to witness a public fever.

— after Heinrich Heine’s Paris music dispatches of 1844, in which he coined the word Lisztomanie

Against this picture of self-display stands the other Liszt, the one his contemporaries found harder to explain: the most open-handed musician of the age. He gave away enormous sums — to flood victims, to the Cologne Cathedral building fund, to the founding of a German national pension for musicians — and when the public subscription for a Beethoven monument at Bonn stalled in the early 1840s, Liszt simply paid the shortfall himself and underwrote the 1845 inauguration festival. His own explanation for all of it was the motto he adopted as his rule of life: Génie oblige — genius has obligations.

Weimar: the conductor and the composer

In 1847, at the absolute height of his fame, Liszt abruptly stopped touring. He had met Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein in Kiev that February; she became his companion for the rest of his life and his fiercest advocate for the idea that he should stop being a travelling showman and become a composer. From 1848 he settled at Weimar as Kapellmeister extraordinary to the Grand Ducal court — the small Thuringian town that had been Goethe and Schiller’s, now made briefly into the headquarters of musical radicalism.

The Weimar decade is the heart of Liszt’s composing life. He invented the symphonic poem — a single-movement orchestral form bound together not by classical development but by thematic transformation, in which a handful of motives are continually remade into new characters — and wrote twelve of them, Les Préludes the most played. He composed the Faust and Dante symphonies, reworked the Transcendental Études into their final 1852 form, and in 1853 completed the Piano Sonata in B minor, the single-movement, half-hour structure that is the summit of the Romantic piano sonata. He dedicated it to Robert Schumann, in return for Schumann’s dedication of his own Fantasie in C.

As a conductor he used Weimar to champion the music he believed in, often at his own professional risk. On 28 August 1850 — Goethe’s birthday — he conducted the world premiere of Wagner’s Lohengrin while Wagner himself, a wanted man after the Dresden uprising, was in political exile in Switzerland and could not attend his own opera. Liszt’s open partisanship for Wagner and Berlioz, and his theory of “the music of the future,” made Weimar one pole of the great mid-century argument that set the New German School against the conservative party gathered around Brahms and the critic Eduard Hanslick.

The organ works

Liszt was never a church organist, yet he wrote three works that permanently enlarged the Romantic organ repertoire — the natural inheritance, on this instrument, of Bach and the immediate ancestor of Franck and Reger.

The Fantasy and Fugue on the chorale “Ad nos, ad salutarem undam”, S. 259 (1850), takes its bare modal theme from the Anabaptist chorus in Meyerbeer’s opera Le prophète and builds from it a continuous half-hour arch of fantasy, hymn and fugue — the first Romantic organ work conceived on a symphonic scale, and still the piece by which organists measure themselves against the instrument’s largest demands. The Prelude and Fugue on B-A-C-H, S. 260 (1855, revised 1870), spells out Bach’s name in the German note-names B♭–A–C–B♮ and drives the cipher through chromatic harmony so dense it stands at the threshold of atonality. And the Variations on “Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen”, S. 180 — written in 1862 after the death of his daughter Blandine, on the descending ground bass Bach had used in his Cantata BWV 12 and again in the Crucifixus of the B-minor Mass — turns a Baroque lament into a Romantic meditation on grief that resolves, at the last, into Bach’s own consoling chorale.

Rome and the Abbé

Liszt and Carolyne had hoped to marry, but the annulment of her earlier marriage collapsed in Rome in 1861 — by the most famous account, on the very eve of the wedding. Liszt remained in Rome, drawing closer to the Catholic Church, and in 1865 received the four minor orders of the priesthood: tonsure, ostiarius, lector, exorcist and acolyte. He was never ordained a priest, and the minor orders carried no bar to marriage; but he wore the cassock for the rest of his life, and Rome and the newspapers called him the Abbé Liszt. The religious impulse, present in him since the Paris crisis of his teens, now produced the oratorios Christus and The Legend of Saint Elisabeth, the Hungarian Coronation Mass for Franz Joseph’s 1867 coronation as King of Hungary, and the stark stations-of-the-cross cycle Via Crucis.

It also produced the strangest and most prophetic music of the century. The late piano pieces — Nuages gris (1881), La lugubre gondola (1882, written at Venice in premonition of Wagner’s death there), Unstern!, the Csárdás macabre, and the Bagatelle sans tonalité of 1885, a “bagatelle without tonality” whose very title refuses a key — abandon the grand manner entirely. They are bleak, harmonically rootless, sometimes barely a page long, and they look straight past Liszt’s own century to Debussy, Bartók and the dissonant music that would not be written for another generation.

Budapest, the students, and the end

From around 1869 Liszt arranged his life in three places at once — winters largely in Rome, springs teaching at Weimar, and time each year in Pest — the vie trifurquée, the “three-forked life,” that the map above traces. In 1875 he became the first president of the new Royal National Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest, the institution that carries his name today. In all three cities he taught, and he taught as he always had: for free. He had refused payment for lessons his entire life, and the masterclasses of his last years drew the young pianists — Eugen d’Albert, Emil von Sauer, Moriz Rosenthal, Alexander Siloti, who would in turn teach Rachmaninoff — through whom the grand Romantic tradition of playing descends to the present.

His Hungarian music belongs to these years and the love of country behind them, even if its materials were not quite what he thought. The Hungarian Rhapsodies draw on the urban verbunkos and café-band style of the Romani musicians Liszt heard in Hungary, rather than the older peasant folk music that Bartók and Kodály would later collect — and that Bartók, with some asperity, distinguished from Liszt’s sources. The patriotic point, for Liszt, was never in doubt: Pest had given him a jewelled sword of honour as a national hero as far back as 1840.

Liszt died at Bayreuth on 31 July 1886, aged seventy-four, of pneumonia caught while attending the Wagner festival run by his daughter Cosima — Wagner’s widow since 1883. He had outlived Wagner, Chopin, Berlioz, Schumann and Mendelssohn, and nearly every quarrel of his enormous life. What he left behind was not only the symphonic poem, the modern recital, the transformed technique of the instrument, and the organ works that join Bach to Franck and Reger, but the example — endlessly imitated, never equalled — of the musician as a public force.