Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt was born in Raiding, in the Hungarian part of the Habsburg Empire, in October 1811. His father was a steward on the Esterházy estates and an amateur musician who gave him his first piano lessons. From the age of nine he was based in Vienna, where he studied with Carl Czerny (a pupil of Beethoven), and in Paris from 1823, where the Conservatoire refused him as a foreigner. He spent the next decade as a touring virtuoso, then, from 1839 to 1847, as the most famous concert pianist in Europe — the period for which Heinrich Heine coined the term *Lisztomania*.

He retired from touring in 1847 to take up a court appointment at Weimar, where he conducted, taught, and composed for thirteen years. The Weimar years produced the symphonic poems (a form Liszt invented), the *Faust* and *Dante* symphonies, the *Sonata in B minor*, and the major late piano works. He took minor orders in the Catholic Church in 1865 and divided his last twenty years between Rome, Weimar and Budapest, teaching a generation of younger pianists — Eugen d’Albert, Moriz Rosenthal, Sophie Menter — and continuing to write the harmonically experimental late works that anticipated much of twentieth-century music.

Liszt died in Bayreuth in July 1886, having travelled to attend the Wagner festival run by his daughter Cosima and son-in-law Richard Wagner. Music Preserved’s archive includes a range of his orchestral and piano work.