96 Facts About Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist and teacher of the Romantic period.

Whereas earlier performers mostly served the upper class, Franz Liszt attracted a more general audience.

Franz Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the New German School.

Franz Liszt left behind an extensive and diverse body of work that influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated 20th-century ideas and trends.

Franz Liszt has been regarded as a forefather of Impressionism in music, with his Annees de pelerinage, often regarded as his masterwork, featuring many impressionistic qualities.

Franz Liszt was born to Anna Liszt and Adam Liszt on 22 October 1811, in the village of Doborjan in Sopron County, in the Kingdom of Hungary, Austrian Empire.

Franz Liszt had been in the service of Prince Nikolaus II Esterhazy and knew Haydn, Hummel, and Beethoven personally.

At age six, Franz Liszt began listening attentively to his father's piano playing.

Franz Liszt found exposure to music through attending Mass, as well as traveling Romani bands that toured the Hungarian countryside.

Adam began teaching him the piano at age seven, and Franz Liszt began composing in an elementary manner when he was eight.

Franz Liszt appeared in concerts at Sopron and Pressburg in October and November 1820 at age nine.

Franz Liszt received lessons in composition from Ferdinando Paer and Antonio Salieri, who was then the music director of the Viennese court.

Franz Liszt's public debut in Vienna on 1 December 1822, at a concert at the "Landstandischer Saal", was a great success.

Franz Liszt was greeted in Austrian and Hungarian aristocratic circles and met Beethoven and Schubert.

Adam Franz Liszt, therefore, took his leave of the Prince's services.

Franz Liszt gave up touring, and in order to earn money, Liszt gave lessons on playing piano and composition, often from early morning until late at night.

Franz Liszt's students were scattered across the city and he had to cover long distances.

Franz Liszt's father insisted that the affair be broken off.

Franz Liszt fell very ill, to the extent that an obituary notice was printed in a Paris newspaper, and he underwent a long period of religious doubts and pessimism.

Franz Liszt again stated a wish to join the Church but was dissuaded this time by his mother.

Franz Liszt had many discussions with the Abbe de Lamennais, who acted as his spiritual father, and with Chretien Urhan, a German-born violinist who introduced him to the Saint-Simonists.

Franz Liszt met Hector Berlioz on 4 December 1830, the day before the premiere of the Symphonie fantastique.

Franz Liszt inherited from Berlioz the diabolic quality of many of his works.

Franz Liszt bore the expense of publishing the transcription himself and played it many times to help popularize the original score.

Franz Liszt was forming a friendship with a third composer who influenced him, Frederic Chopin; under his influence, Liszt's poetic and romantic side began to develop.

In 1833, Franz Liszt began his relationship with the Countess Marie d'Agoult.

In 1835, the countess left her husband and family to join Franz Liszt in Geneva; Franz Liszt's daughter with the countess, Blandine, was born there on 18 December.

Franz Liszt taught at the newly founded Geneva Conservatory, wrote a manual of piano technique and contributed essays for the Paris Revue et gazette musicale.

On 9 May 1839, Franz Liszt's and the countess's only son, Daniel, was born, but that autumn relations between them became strained.

Franz Liszt heard that plans for a Beethoven Monument in Bonn were in danger of collapse for lack of funds and pledged his support.

The countess returned to Paris with the children, while Franz Liszt gave six concerts in Vienna, then toured Hungary.

Franz Liszt wrote his Three Concert Etudes between 1845 and 1849.

Franz Liszt was seen as handsome by many, with the German poet Heinrich Heine writing concerning his showmanship during concerts: "How powerful, how shattering was his mere physical appearance".

In 1841, Franz Liszt was admitted to the Freemason's lodge "Unity" "Zur Einigkeit", in Frankfurt am Main.

Franz Liszt was promoted to the second degree and elected master as a member of the lodge "Zur Eintracht", in Berlin.

The reception that Franz Liszt enjoyed, as a result, can be described only as hysterical.

Many witnesses later testified that Franz Liszt's playing raised the mood of audiences to a level of mystical ecstasy.

Franz Liszt had made so much money by his mid-forties that nearly all his performing fees after 1857 went to charity.

Franz Liszt persuaded him to concentrate on composition, which meant giving up his career as a traveling virtuoso.

Franz Liszt spent the winter with the princess at her estate in Woronince.

Franz Liszt gave lessons to a number of pianists, including the great virtuoso Hans von Bulow, who married Liszt's daughter Cosima in 1857.

Finally, Franz Liszt had ample time to compose and during the next 12 years revised or produced those orchestral and choral pieces upon which his reputation as a composer mainly rested.

Franz Liszt eventually wished to marry Liszt, but since she had been previously married and her husband, Russian military officer Prince Nikolaus zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Ludwigsburg, was still alive, she had to convince the Roman Catholic authorities that her marriage to him had been invalid.

In letters to friends, Franz Liszt announced that he would retreat to a solitary living.

Franz Liszt found it at the monastery Madonna del Rosario, just outside Rome, where on 20 June 1863, he took up quarters in a small, spartan apartment.

Franz Liszt had on 23 June 1857, already joined the Third Order of Saint Francis.

On some occasions, Franz Liszt took part in Rome's musical life.

On 4 January 1866, Franz Liszt directed the "Stabat mater" of his Christus-Oratorio, and, on 26 February 1866, his Dante Symphony.

Franz Liszt was invited back to Weimar in 1869 to give master classes in piano playing.

Franz Liszt himself came in March 1876 to give some lessons and a charity concert.

In spite of the conditions under which Franz Liszt had been appointed as "Koniglicher Rat", he neither directed the orchestra of the National Theatre nor permanently settled in Hungary.

Franz Liszt never took part in the final examinations, which were in the summer of every year.

Some pupils joined the lessons that Franz Liszt gave in the summer in Weimar.

Franz Liszt fell down the stairs of a hotel in Weimar on 2 July 1881.

Franz Liszt was left immobilized for eight weeks after the accident and never fully recovered from it.

On 13 January 1886, while Claude Debussy was staying at the Villa Medici in Rome, Franz Liszt met him there with Paul Vidal and Ernest Hebert, director of the French Academy.

Franz Liszt played Au bord d'une source from his Annees de pelerinage, as well as his arrangement of Schubert's Ave Maria for the musicians.

The composer Camille Saint-Saens, an old friend, whom Franz Liszt had once called "the greatest organist in the world", dedicated his Symphony No 3 "Organ Symphony" to Franz Liszt; it had premiered in London only a few weeks before the death of its dedicatee.

Franz Liszt died in Bayreuth, Germany, on 31 July 1886, at the age of 74, officially as a result of pneumonia, which he may have contracted during the Bayreuth Festival hosted by his daughter Cosima.

Franz Liszt was buried on 3 August 1886, in the municipal cemetery of Bayreuth against his wishes.

Many musicians consider Franz Liszt to be the greatest pianist who ever lived.

Carl Czerny said Franz Liszt was a natural who played according to feeling, and reviews of his concerts especially praise the brilliance, strength, and precision in his playing.

Franz Liszt's playing contains abandonment, a liberated feeling, but even when it becomes impetuous and energetic in his fortissimo, it is still without harshness and dryness.

Franz Liszt was sometimes mocked in the press for facial expressions and gestures at the piano.

Berlioz tells how Franz Liszt would add cadenzas, tremolos, and trills when he played the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and created a dramatic scene by changing the tempo between Largo and Presto.

Franz Liszt's performance commenced with Handel's Fugue in E minor, which was played by Liszt with avoidance of everything approaching meretricious ornament and indeed scarcely any additions, except a multitude of appropriate harmonies, casting a glow of color over the beauties of the composition and infusing into it a spirit which from no other hand it ever before received.

Frequently-played works include Weber's Konzertstuck, Beethoven's Emperor Concerto and Choral Fantasy, and Franz Liszt's reworking of the Hexameron for piano and orchestra.

Franz Liszt kept the piano at his Villa Altenburg residence in Weimar.

Franz Liszt called it a "piano-Liszt" and installed it in Villa Altenburg in July 1854, the instrument is exhibited in the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde collection in Vienna.

Franz Liszt owned two other organs that were installed later in his Budapest residence.

Franz Liszt is best known for his piano music, but he wrote for orchestra and for other ensembles, almost always including keyboard.

Franz Liszt is credited with the creation of the symphonic poem.

The largest and best-known portion of Franz Liszt's music is his original piano work.

Franz Liszt's thoroughly revised masterwork, "Annees de pelerinage", includes arguably his most provocative and stirring pieces.

Franz Liszt wrote substantial quantities of piano transcriptions of a wide variety of music.

Franz Liszt played many of them himself in celebrated performances.

Franz Liszt wrote the monumental set of variations on the first section of the second movement chorus from Bach's cantata Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen, BWV 12, which he composed after the death of his daughter in 1862.

Franz Liszt wrote a Requiem for organ solo, intended to be performed liturgically, along with the spoken Requiem Mass.

Franz Liszt composed about six dozen original songs with piano accompaniment.

Franz Liszt began with the song "Angiolin dal biondo crin" in 1839, and, by 1844, had composed about two dozen songs.

Since in the second half of 1858 Franz Liszt was preparing his songs for publication and he had at that time just received the first act of Wagner's Tristan, it is most likely that the version on the paste-over was a quotation from Wagner.

In July 1854, Franz Liszt stated in his essay about Berlioz and Harold in Italy that not all music was program music.

Franz Liszt attempted in the symphonic poem to extend this revitalization of the nature of musical discourse and add to it the Romantic ideal of reconciling classical formal principles to external literary concepts.

At a later stage, Franz Liszt experimented with "forbidden" things such as parallel 5ths in the "Csardas macabre" and atonality in the Bagatelle sans tonalite.

Besides his musical works, Franz Liszt wrote essays about many subjects.

At the beginning of 1837, Franz Liszt published a review of some piano works of Sigismond Thalberg.

Franz Liszt published a series of writings titled "Baccalaureus letters", ending in 1841.

Franz Liszt worked until at least 1885 on a treatise for modern harmony.

Franz Liszt told Friedheim that the time was not yet ripe to publish the manuscript, titled Sketches for a Harmony of the Future.

From 1827 onwards, Franz Liszt gave lessons in composition and piano playing.

Franz Liszt wrote on 23 December 1829 that his schedule was so full of lessons that each day, from half-past eight in the morning till 10 at night, he had scarcely breathing time.

In spring 1844, in Dresden, Franz Liszt met the young Hans von Bulow, his later son-in-law.

Franz Liszt offered his students little technical advice, expecting them to "wash their dirty linen at home," as he phrased it.

Franz Liszt was troubled when German newspapers published details of pedagogue Theodor Kullak's will, revealing that Kullak had generated more than one million marks from teaching.

Franz Liszt wrote to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, urging Kullak's sons to create an endowment for needy musicians, as Liszt himself frequently did.

Franz Liszt has been portrayed on screen by a number of actors:.