Liszt was born in Raiding, Hungary, and grew up m a musical
environment — his father was an official at the Esterhazy court
where Haydn had worked. The family soon moved to Vienna where
Liszt studied the piano with Carl Czerny and composition with
Mozart's rival, Antonio Salieri. At a concert given in the
presence of Beethoven, Liszt is said to have been rewarded with a
kiss on the forehead from the aging master.
In 1823 Liszt arrived in Pans, where he soon became a
celebrated performer and toured France. He also played in England
in 1824, where he was received by King George IV, before illness
and the death of his father from typhoid prompted his return. He
went back to Paris in 1826, where he befriended Berlioz and Chopin
and began his career as a progressive and visionary composer. He
also considered becoming a priest and on top of everything else
fell in love - these three sides to his character competed for
ascendancy during the rest of his life.
As a composer Liszt was influenced by leading Romantics, such
as the author Victor Hugo and the painter Eugene
Delacroix: while Chopin brought out his poetic nature, Berlioz
encouraged the latent Mephistophelian character in his music. On
hearing Paganini in 1831 Liszt set out to match the violinist's
astonishing virtuosity in his own work, and wrote a piano
transcription of Paganini's La campanella. These diabolical
and fiendishly virtuoso elements would later find expression in
the swirling Mepliisto waltzes for piano.
In 1834 Liszt began a long affair with the Countess Mane
d'Agoult, and the couple moved to Geneva the following year. He
continued to perform widely, and won a famous piano duel against
his rival Sigismond Thalbergin 1837. In 1839 he began touring
extensively as he sought to raise funds for a Beethoven memorial
in Bonn. His piano-playing created a sensation wherever he went.
He was honoured in his native Hungary, where he rediscovered the
interest in gypsy music that would later inspire his Hungarian
rhapsodies. He also proposed the establishment of a national
conservatoire in Budapest. But his long absences from home cost
him his relationship with the countess and they separated in 1844.
Liszt had a succession of mistresses during these touring years
until, m 1847, the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein of Kiev
persuaded him to give up travelling and settle as a full-time
conductor and composer in Weimar, Germany. In the course of the
next 12 years he conducted music by Wagner (including the first
performance of Lohengrin m 1850) Schumann, Berlioz. Verdi,
and others, m addition to performances of his own works. Weimar
became the shrine of the "New German School'', and pianists and
composers flocked there for lessons or consultations with Liszt,
for which he refused payment. However, his cohabitation with the
married princess was becoming a court scandal, and his
enthusiastic support of Wagner (then a political exile) was highly
controversial. He resigned his post in 1858 and eventually left
Weimar in 1861.
Liszt is credited with the invention of the symphonic poem and
he completed all but one of the works employing this
quintessentially Romantic form during his Weimar years. The main
technique was "thematic transformation", in which one or more
musical themes, representing heroic people or ideas, evolved
throughout the work, thus providing both musical structure and
Romantic narrative. The technique reached its zenith in his
Piano sonata in В Minor (1853) and m the Faust symphony
Liszt eventually joined Princess Carolyne m Rome where she had
tried, in the end unsuccessfully, to persuade the Pope to grant a
divorce. He remained there for eight years, occupying himself
mainly with music inspired by religion, including the reflective
Annees de pelerinage (Years of pilgrimage) for piano. These
pieces are in three volumes: the first deals with Swiss subjects,
the second with Italian, and the
third is an unauthorized volume published after Liszt's death.
In 1 865 he took the four minor orders of the Catholic Church.
Invitations to Weimar in 1869 and to Budapest in 1871 marked
the beginning of a new phase in his life and he subsequently
travelled continually between these two cities and Rome. The three
centres symbolized the visionary artist, the passionate gypsy, and
the pious Catholic that lived within the same man.
Liszt's final tour in 1886 took him once again to Paris and
London, but he soon became weak with dropsy and spent his last
days in the Wagner festival town of Bayreuth. There he was looked
after by Cosima, his second daughter by the Countess d'Agoult and
by then Wagner's widow, and was able to attend a production of
Parsifal before dying from pneumonia. Liszt left behind more
than 400 original works in addition to many transcriptions and
arrangements, and he made an impact during his life as the most
phenomenal pianist of his time.