In his years before the public, he was recognized as a pianist of diabolical stamina. Franz Liszt was the inventor of the modern piano recital. While most of his rivals cultivated their reputations on the more intimate salon circuit, Liszt graduated to the larger halls. He was the first to turn the piano sideways, the better to show off his long hair and noble profile, like that of a Hungarian falcon.
He made mincemeat of the delicate instruments of his day, which were unable to withstand his musical onslaughts. In a masterstroke of showmanship, he always kept a spare on stage. On at least one occasion, he went to head-to-head with an orchestra. He mesmerized his audiences with his superhuman transcriptions and paraphrases, whipping them into frenzies. The ladies of Europe forgot their manners and rushed the stage. Skirmishes broke out, as they wrestled for his gloves and cigar butts, carelessly, calculatedly, left behind.
Liszt enjoyed enormous fame. He accumulated staggering wealth. And he enjoyed prodigious love affairs. Then all at once, at the age of 35, he simply walked away. He knew he was more than a vulgar showman, and he was eager to explore other avenues. He may have been a man who savored the privileges of celebrity, but he was also an intellectual and an artist of the spirit. In fact, he was one of the most innovative musical thinkers who ever lived.
Among his innumerable achievements, he pioneered a technique known as thematic transformation, which he employed in his own compositions, as a radical alternative to traditional classical form. He is also credited with the creation of the symphonic poem. Without Liszt, there would have been no Wagner as we know him. In fact, Romantic music would have had to find its own way.
He also happened to be extraordinarily generous. He never took payment from any of his pupils. He programmed the operas of Wagner and Berlioz, when nobody else would touch them. He selflessly promoted the works of Grieg, Smetana, Debussy, Saint-Saëns, Fauré, Borodin, and many others. He was lured back to the concert stage only for charitable purposes – for the relief of victims of fire and flood, in support of political refugees, and to raise money for a Beethoven monument in Bonn.
When Wagner was on the run as a fugitive for his role in the 1849 Dresden uprising, Liszt, then a prominent conductor at the Weimar court, not only gave him the money to flee to Switzerland, he endorsed Wagner’s courtship of his (already married) daughter. Wagner’s “Tristan chord” would send shockwaves throughout Europe, changing music forever, but in actuality it was only one of the many innovations he borrowed from his future father-in-law.
Liszt’s later music at times anticipates the experiments of the 20th century, by composers as diverse as Debussy, Scriabin, and Schoenberg. “My sole ambition as composer,” he once pronounced, “is to hurl my lance into the infinite space of the future.”
For his pains, he was unrelentingly lambasted by his critics and intrigued against by jealous rivals. At various points throughout his career, he was dismissed for pandering to the mob, ridiculed as a charlatan and a hypocrite, and shunned for his long-term relationships with two women who fled troubled marriages.
Yet there is a depth and spirituality in his greatest music that defies all charges. Liszt may have been something of a glamor puss, but he was not a shallow man. He was an intellectual, and he was also devoutly religious, even to the point of taking minor orders and living in a cell in Rome. In all, he was a fascinating amalgam of charlatan and visionary, sinner and saint, peacock and messiah.
Happy birthday, Franz Liszt (1811-1886). One thing you were not was listless!
“Totentanz” (“Dance of Death”), 1849, rev. 1859
“Nuages gris” (“Grey Clouds”), gnomic and existential,1881
“La lugubre gondola,” Liszt’s premonition of Wagner’s funeral procession through the canals of Venice, 1882
Transcription of Saint-Saëns’ “Danse Macabre,” 1874
“Mephisto Waltz No. 1,” 1860
“A Faust Symphony,” 1857
