Franz Liszt was born on October 22, 1811 in (Raiding) Doborjan, Hungary and died on July 31, 1886 in Bayreuth, Germany at the age of seventy-seven. His father Adam Liszt, worked at the Esterhazy estates in eastern Hungary as a clerk.
Franz began the study of music when he was six years old. His father, who was an amateur musician himself, gave him his first piano lessons. He played his first concert when he was only nine years old. After his second concert, Michael Esterhazy and other close friends collected money and offered it to the Liszt family so that he could study music and get more training abroad.
The family moved to Vienna, Austria and decided to hire Carl Czerny to teach Franz piano. Czerny taught Liszt for free, as did Antonio Salieri, who taught him counterpoint and score reading. Liszt studied with Czerny for fourteen months, which allowed him to develop excellent piano technique. It was at that time that he had composed and published his first composition, a variation on a theme by Diabelli. After a farewell concert, Liszt and his family left for Paris, France in 1823.
Upon arriving in Paris, he applied for admission to the Conservatoire de Paris and was denied because he was not a native born French citizen. Because of this, Liszt opted to study music theory with Antoine Reicha and composition with Ferdinando Paer privately.
Liszt’s father died of typhoid fever when he was sixteen years old. Because Franz was left with the responsibility of earning income to support his mother, he found work as a piano instructor for the middle class.
In 1832, Liszt met Marie d’Agoult. Marie and Liszt had three children together and separated after twelve years. In 1847, Liszt met Princess Carolyn von Sayn-Wittgenstein. It is believed that he spent the rest of his life with Princess Carolyn.
While in Paris, he met Berlioz, Chopin and Hiller. Liszt also kept company with Wagner, Brahms, the Schumanns and Mendelssohn. There was a philosophical debate waged by the conservative composers including Brahms and Clara Schumann against the progressive composers, such as Liszt and Berlioz, who were beginning to experiment with and alter the traditional compositional forms.
As a composer, Liszt is recognized as the creator of the symphonic poem. He is also known for developing the compositional technique known as thematic transformation. In all, Franz Liszt composed over 300 different musical works with the B minor Piano Sonata being one his most important creations. Of all his compositions, this is one of the most widely studied and debated compositions of the nineteenth century.
As a performer, Liszt was the first to introduce a new kind of technical and expressive piano vocabulary. His abilities took him far beyond what any other pianist had been able to accomplish prior to that time. Those abilities, combined with new technology in piano construction, allowed him to become perhaps the most influential composer and performer of the nineteenth century.
Posted 28 November 2007