Franz Liszt

Few figures in the history of music command the field as completely as Franz Liszt, and few are as difficult to hold within a single frame. He was the supreme piano virtuoso of the nineteenth century, a performer of such command that audiences fainted, wept, and fought over his discarded gloves, and the phenomenon that surrounded him was given its own name, Lisztomania, by a baffled and admiring press. He was also a composer of restless originality who invented the symphonic poem, pioneered the technique of thematic transformation, pushed harmony toward the very edge of tonality decades before the modernists arrived, and left behind more than seven hundred works. He was a conductor who fought for the music of the future, a teacher who trained an entire generation of pianists without ever charging a fee, a writer, a traveler, a courtier, and finally a man in minor holy orders who signed his letters as the Abbé Liszt. To study the life and music of Franz Liszt, the greatest pianist of the Romantic era, is to follow a single human being through nearly every role the art of music could offer in his century, and to watch him transform each one.

He was born in a German-speaking village in the Kingdom of Hungary, made his name in Vienna and Paris, settled for his most productive years in a small German court town, spent a decade in Rome in a monk's cassock, and died in the Bavarian town of Bayreuth at the festival theater built by his son-in-law Richard Wagner. He belonged to everyone and to no single nation, and he insisted to the end of his life that he was Hungarian, though he never learned to speak Hungarian fluently and spent most of his career far from the land of his birth. He gave away most of the money he earned. He championed the music of rivals and unknowns with a generosity that has no equal among composers of the first rank. He was vain, and he knew it, and he spent his last decades in a search for humility that was as sincere as it was incomplete.

The story of Franz Liszt is, in part, the story of how the modern performing artist came into being. Before Liszt, the pianist shared the stage with singers, orchestras, and assorted other entertainers; after Liszt, the pianist could fill a hall alone, playing an entire program from memory, and the word for that event, recital, entered the language because of him. Before Liszt, the idea that a touring instrumentalist could be a cultural sensation on the scale of a monarch or a general would have seemed absurd; after Liszt, it was simply a fact of artistic life. But the deeper story is the story of a musician who refused to be only a virtuoso, who walked away from the most lucrative career any performer had ever enjoyed in order to compose, and who spent the second half of his life trying to justify, in serious and lasting work, the adoration the first half had brought him. This is the life of that musician, told from the village of his birth to the grave at Bayreuth.

Early Life in the Kingdom of Hungary

Franz Liszt was born on the twenty-second of October, 1811, in the village of Doborjan, in Sopron County in the western reaches of the Kingdom of Hungary. The kingdom was at that time a constituent realm of the Austrian Empire, and the village itself, German-speaking and modest, lay close to the present-day border; today it is the town of Raiding and stands within the borders of Austria. The question of where exactly Franz Liszt came from is therefore not a simple one, and it would shadow him for the whole of his life. His native village belonged to Hungary, and he claimed Hungary as his homeland with a fierce and lifelong loyalty, but the language of his cradle and his household was German, and he would master French long before he made any serious attempt at Hungarian. He was, in the deepest sense, a child of the multinational empire of central Europe, formed by several cultures and fully owned by none.

His father was Adam Liszt, a man of real but frustrated musical gifts who worked as a steward and clerk in the service of the princely house of Esterhazy, the immensely wealthy Hungarian magnates whose patronage had once supported Joseph Haydn for the better part of three decades. Adam Liszt was no mere bookkeeper. He played the cello, the piano, and the guitar with genuine skill, he had performed in the Esterhazy orchestra, and he had moved, at least at the edges, in a world that included some of the most distinguished musicians of the age. He had wanted a musician's life for himself and had not been able to secure it, and when his only child began, very early, to show signs of extraordinary talent, the father poured into the son every ambition that his own career had disappointed.

The boy's mother was Maria Anna Lager, a gentle and devout woman from Krems an der Donau in Lower Austria who had been orphaned young and had worked as a chambermaid before her marriage. She was the steady center of the household and would remain, throughout her long life, one of the very few fixed points in her son's restless existence. Franz was their only child. The family was not poor in the sense of being destitute, for Adam Liszt held a respectable post, but they lived on a modest official's salary in a small house, and there was nothing in their circumstances to suggest that the child playing in their rooms would within a decade be performing for the crowned heads of Europe.

Accounts of Liszt's earliest years describe a delicate, often sickly boy, nervous and dreamy, subject to fevers and to a religious imagination that was already vivid in childhood. At one point he was so gravely ill that a coffin was reportedly ordered, and the family's relief at his recovery deepened the sense, which his father in particular never lost, that this was a child marked out for something. The boy was drawn to the piano almost as soon as he could reach the keys. Adam Liszt began teaching him at the age of seven, in 1818, and discovered very quickly that he was dealing with a pupil whose progress outran any reasonable expectation. The child could read music at sight, improvise, and reproduce after a single hearing pieces that should have taken weeks to learn. He had, in addition, an unusually fine ear and a memory that seemed to absorb everything placed before it.

It is worth pausing over the world into which this gift emerged. Western Hungary in the second decade of the nineteenth century was a rural society of great estates, peasant villages, and a thin layer of German and Hungarian officialdom. Music was everywhere in it, but most of it was functional: church music, dance music, the music of the regimental bands and the village inns. The career of a concert artist as the modern world would understand it barely existed. For a steward's son in Doborjan to become a professional musician at all was a long stretch; for him to become a famous one would require a chain of fortunate encounters, powerful patrons, and a father willing to gamble the family's security on the talent of a child. All of those things, improbably, came together.

The Discovery of a Prodigy

The decisive year was 1820, when Franz Liszt was nine years old. Adam Liszt arranged for the boy to appear in public, first in the nearby town of Sopron and then, more importantly, in Pressburg, the city known in Hungarian as Pozsony and today as Bratislava, the capital of Slovakia, which then served as the seat of the Hungarian Diet. Pressburg in the autumn of 1820 was full of the Hungarian nobility, gathered for the sessions of the Diet, and it was before an audience of magnates and aristocrats that the nine-year-old Liszt gave the concert that changed the direction of his life.

The performance was a sensation. The boy played a concerto by Ferdinand Ries and improvised, as was the custom, on a theme handed up from the audience, and the assembled nobles recognized at once that they were in the presence of a prodigy of the first order. A group of wealthy Hungarian aristocrats, among them members of the Amade, Apponyi, Szapary, and Esterhazy families, agreed on the spot to underwrite the boy's musical education. They settled on him an annual stipend of six hundred gulden for a period of six years, a sum that would allow Adam Liszt to take leave of his post, move his family, and devote himself entirely to the development of his son's talent.

This act of collective patronage is one of the hinges of the whole story. Without it, Franz Liszt would in all probability have remained a gifted provincial, perhaps a church organist or a teacher, perhaps a member of an Esterhazy ensemble like his father before him. With it, the family could afford to pursue the very best instruction available in the German-speaking world. The Hungarian magnates who put up the money in Pressburg in 1820 cannot have known that they were investing in the man who would become the most famous musician of the century, but they understood that they had heard something rare, and they acted on it. Liszt, for his part, never forgot the debt. The conviction that he owed something to Hungary, that his career was in some sense a gift the Hungarian nobility had made possible and that he was obliged to repay, took root in him in that year and never left him.

In the wake of the Pressburg triumph, Adam Liszt made his decision. He applied for and obtained a leave of absence from the Esterhazy estate, gave up the security of his position, and prepared to move his family to Vienna, the imperial capital and the unrivaled musical center of central Europe. It was a bold and, by ordinary standards, a reckless step. A steward in his middle forties was abandoning a settled livelihood to stake everything on a nine-year-old child. But Adam Liszt had heard what the magnates of Pressburg had heard, and he had lived long enough with his own thwarted ambitions to be certain that this chance must not be wasted. Late in 1822 the Liszts arrived in Vienna, and the second act of the prodigy's education began.

Vienna: Czerny, Salieri, and the Lessons of Genius

Vienna in the early 1820s was a city saturated with music and haunted by greatness. Beethoven, deaf and ailing, still lived within its walls, a figure of almost mythic stature whose late quartets and last sonatas were even then taking shape. Franz Schubert, only a few years from his early death, was at the height of his powers in the same streets. The memory of Mozart and Haydn was fresh, the imperial court maintained its musical establishment, and the city's salons, theaters, and churches provided a denser musical life than could be found anywhere else in Europe. For a young pianist seeking instruction, there was no better place on earth, and Adam Liszt set about securing the best teachers the city could offer.

For the piano he approached Carl Czerny. Czerny was himself a former pupil of Beethoven, a phenomenally productive composer of studies and exercises, and one of the most respected piano teachers in Vienna. He was also, by temperament, a careful and methodical man, and his first reaction to the boy his father brought to him was a measured skepticism. The young Liszt, by Czerny's own later account, played with dazzling natural facility but without discipline, with a wildness of touch and an indifference to method that the teacher found alarming as much as impressive. Czerny saw raw, untrained genius, and he resolved to impose on it the rigorous foundation it lacked.

What followed was the most important formal training Liszt ever received. Czerny drilled him in scales, in the proper position of the hand, in legato playing, in the works of Bach and Clementi and Beethoven, in everything that would convert a brilliant improviser into a complete musician. The discipline did not come naturally to the boy, and there were tensions, but the result was decisive. Liszt emerged from his lessons with Czerny in command of a technique that no rival of his generation could match, and he never forgot what he owed to it. Years later, at the summit of his fame, he would dedicate his great set of Transcendental Etudes to Carl Czerny, an acknowledgment from the most celebrated pianist in the world to the patient teacher who had given him his foundation. Remarkably, Czerny, recognizing the magnitude of the talent in his care, taught the boy without payment.

For instruction in composition and music theory, Adam Liszt turned to Antonio Salieri. Salieri was by then an old man, the long-serving court composer of the Habsburg emperors, a figure whose name would later be unjustly blackened by the legend that he had poisoned Mozart. In reality he was a distinguished and generous teacher who had given lessons to Beethoven, to Schubert, and to many others, and who now took the young Liszt under his wing, again without a fee. Under Salieri the boy learned the grammar of music, the handling of voices, the conventions of operatic and orchestral writing that would underpin everything he later composed.

The Vienna years, brief as they were, gave Liszt his public début on the largest stage available. On the first of December, 1822, he gave a concert in the city that drew warm and serious notice. The Viennese press, accustomed to prodigies and not easily impressed, wrote of him in terms that went well beyond the usual indulgence shown to clever children. A second concert followed in the spring of 1823. The boy was being talked about, and the talk was beginning to spread beyond Vienna. Adam Liszt, watching the reception, concluded that his son had outgrown even the imperial capital, and that the next stage of his conquest should be Paris, the most glittering city in Europe and the one that could make a reputation truly international.

The Legend of Beethoven's Kiss

No episode of Liszt's youth has been retold more often, or with more embroidery, than the story of his meeting with Ludwig van Beethoven. According to the version that became famous, Beethoven attended Liszt's concert in Vienna in the spring of 1823, was overwhelmed by the playing of the eleven-year-old boy, climbed onto the platform afterward, and kissed him on the forehead in a gesture that came to be called the Weihekuss, the kiss of consecration. The image was irresistible: the dying titan of the old age anointing the prodigy who would carry music into the new one, the apostolic succession of genius made visible in a single embrace.

The truth is harder to recover and almost certainly less tidy. Beethoven by 1823 was profoundly deaf, often unwell, and notoriously reluctant to appear in public or to be drawn into social occasions. The idea that he sat through a piano recital and was moved to a spontaneous public gesture has been doubted by serious scholars, and the most careful accounts treat the dramatic version of the kiss as a later embellishment, polished and reshaped over the decades, not least by Liszt himself, who told the story in varying forms throughout his life and was not above improving it. What does seem likely is that some meeting between the great composer and the prodigy took place, very possibly arranged by Czerny, who had been Beethoven's pupil and could open the older man's door. Whether Beethoven came to the concert, or received the boy privately, or whether the celebrated kiss occurred at all in the form the legend describes, cannot now be established with certainty.

Yet the legend matters, and it matters in a way that mere fact-checking cannot dissolve. Liszt believed, and wanted others to believe, that a line of descent ran from Beethoven through Czerny to himself, and he spent his life acting as though that inheritance imposed obligations. He championed Beethoven's music when it was still considered difficult and forbidding. He played the late sonatas in public when few others would. He raised, almost single-handedly through a long campaign of benefit concerts, the funds that finally completed the Beethoven monument unveiled at Bonn in 1845. The kiss of consecration, whatever physically happened in that Vienna spring, expressed a real truth about how Liszt understood his own vocation. He saw himself as a custodian of a sacred tradition, and the story of Beethoven's blessing was the founding myth of that self-understanding.

Paris and the Closed Door of the Conservatoire

In the autumn of 1823 the Liszt family left Vienna for Paris, traveling by way of a string of German cities, Munich, Augsburg, Stuttgart, Strasbourg, in each of which the boy gave concerts that paid for the journey and spread his name a little farther. He was not quite twelve years old. The family reached Paris in December, and Adam Liszt moved at once to enroll his son in the Conservatoire, the great state-supported school of music that was the gateway to a French career and the most prestigious training institution in Europe.

The door was shut in his face. The director of the Conservatoire was Luigi Cherubini, the formidable Italian-born composer who governed the institution with a rigid hand, and Cherubini refused to admit the boy on the simple ground that he was a foreigner. The regulations, he maintained, reserved places for French nationals, and no exception would be made, not even for a prodigy whose reputation had preceded him across the German states. It was a bruising rejection, and Liszt remembered it. The closed door of the Conservatoire was one more confirmation that he belonged nowhere by birthright, that whatever he achieved he would have to achieve as an outsider, and that institutions could not be relied upon to recognize talent.

The rejection, as it turned out, did little harm. Paris itself supplied what the Conservatoire withheld. Adam Liszt arranged for his son to study composition privately with two of the most capable teachers available in the city: Anton Reicha, the Bohemian-born theorist and pedagogue whose pupils would include Berlioz and later Gounod and Franck, and Ferdinando Paer, an Italian opera composer of standing and experience. From Reicha, Liszt absorbed counterpoint, fugue, and the disciplined craft of composition; from Paer, the practical knowledge of the theater, of how operas were built and staged, knowledge that bore fruit with surprising speed.

Paris in 1824 received the boy with an enthusiasm that more than compensated for the Conservatoire's snub. He was taken up by the salons, the aristocratic drawing rooms where reputations were made, and the press christened him "le petit Litz," spelling his name as French ears heard it. He was compared to Mozart, the inevitable comparison for any keyboard prodigy, and the comparison stuck. He crossed the Channel to England as well, performing in London in 1824 and again in the following years, appearing before fashionable audiences and, on at least one occasion, before King George IV himself. Billed in England as "Master Liszt," the boy charmed the British public as thoroughly as he had charmed the Parisian one. For a child of twelve and thirteen, traveling between Paris and London, fêted in the great houses of two capitals, the world must have seemed an endless succession of triumphs.

The Boy Virtuoso and the Opera Don Sanche

The most ambitious project of Liszt's boyhood was an opera. Encouraged by Paer, and drawing on everything Reicha and Paer had taught him, the thirteen-year-old composer set to work on a one-act stage piece, Don Sanche, ou Le chateau d'amour, a light romantic tale of a young knight, an enchanted castle, and the trials of love. That the Paris Opera, the Academie Royale de Musique, the most exclusive operatic stage in Europe, agreed to mount a work by a boy not yet fourteen is itself a measure of the reputation Liszt had built. Don Sanche was performed there on the seventeenth of October, 1825, five days before its composer's fourteenth birthday.

The opera was a modest success at best. It received a handful of performances and then slipped from the repertory, and for the better part of a century it was assumed to be lost; the score was rediscovered only in the early twentieth century. As a work of art Don Sanche is an apprentice piece, interesting chiefly because of the age of the hand that wrote it and because it shows the young Liszt already at ease with the orchestra and the voice. But the experience of composing for the stage, of hearing his own music sung and played by professionals at the Opera, gave the boy a confidence and a practical grounding that few musicians of any age could claim.

These were the years of relentless touring. Adam Liszt drove his son hard, and the schedule of concerts in France, in England, in Switzerland, was punishing for a growing boy. The performances were brilliant and the receipts were good, but the strain was real, and it is during this period that one begins to sense the first cracks in the dazzling surface of the prodigy's life. Liszt was no longer quite the wide-eyed child of the Pressburg concert. He was an adolescent, increasingly aware that his life consisted of being displayed, increasingly drawn to books and to religion, increasingly uneasy about the difference between being admired and being understood. The machine of the touring prodigy ran on, but the boy inside it was beginning to want something else.

The Death of Adam Liszt and the Years of Doubt

In the summer of 1827 the family traveled to Boulogne-sur-Mer, on the northern coast of France, where it was hoped that sea-bathing would restore the health of the exhausted teenager. It was there, on the twenty-eighth of August, 1827, that Adam Liszt fell ill with typhoid fever and, within a few days, died. He was fifty years old. His son, not yet sixteen, was suddenly without the father who had been, for the whole of his conscious life, his teacher, his manager, his disciplinarian, and the architect of his entire career.

Adam Liszt's death was the great dividing line of his son's youth. On his deathbed, according to the account Liszt later gave, the father warned the boy against women, foreseeing that they would trouble his life, a warning that the future would render almost comically inadequate. But the more important effect of the loss was structural. The driving force behind the touring prodigy was gone. Liszt brought his father's body back for burial, returned to Paris, sent for his mother, who had been staying with relatives, and set up a household with her in the city. And then, decisively, he stopped.

For the next several years Liszt withdrew almost entirely from the concert platform. He supported himself and his mother by teaching piano to the daughters of the Parisian well-to-do, a respectable and tedious occupation that paid the bills and left him free to do what he most wanted, which was to read, to think, and to wrestle with the questions of religion and purpose that had been gathering in him since childhood. He fell into a long depression. He read voraciously and without system: religious works, the Romantic poets, philosophy, history, the social and political thinkers who were beginning to imagine a transformed society. He was so withdrawn from public life that a Paris newspaper, in 1828, actually published an obituary for him, mistaking his disappearance for death. He read the notice of his own passing and found in it a strange confirmation of how completely the prodigy had vanished.

Above all, Liszt wanted to enter the Church. The religious imagination that had been vivid in him as a sickly child had deepened into a genuine vocation, or what felt like one, and the adolescent seriously intended to become a priest. He was dissuaded, gently but firmly, by his mother and by the clergy he consulted, who counseled him that his gift was itself a calling and that he should not abandon it. The desire to take holy orders was set aside, but it was not extinguished; it went underground, and it would resurface, decisively, nearly forty years later. For the present, the unhappy young man emerged slowly from his crisis, and what drew him back into the world was not consolation but excitement, the electric ferment of Paris in the years around the Revolution of 1830.

Paris in Ferment: Paganini, Chopin, and Berlioz

The Paris to which Liszt returned, fully and eagerly, at the turn of the 1830s was one of the most intellectually charged cities the modern world had yet produced. The July Revolution of 1830 toppled the restored Bourbon monarchy and replaced it with the citizen-king Louis-Philippe, and the upheaval released a flood of political and social hope. Liszt, caught up in the excitement, began sketching a Revolutionary Symphony, a work that was never completed but that signaled his sense that music must engage with the great public questions of the age. He was drawn to the followers of Saint-Simon, the utopian socialists who preached a new society organized around productive labor and the leadership of artists and engineers, and he was drawn even more powerfully to the Abbe Felicite de Lamennais, the priest and Christian thinker whose vision of a renewed, socially conscious Catholicism spoke directly to the religious idealism Liszt had never abandoned. Liszt would later spend time at Lamennais's retreat in Brittany, and the older man's blend of faith and social passion left a permanent mark on him.

But the transformations that mattered most for Liszt the musician came from three encounters with three contemporaries, and the first and most violent of these was his discovery of Niccolo Paganini. The Italian violinist arrived in Paris and gave a series of concerts that left the city stunned. Paganini's command of his instrument was so far beyond anything audiences had experienced that it seemed scarcely human; rumors circulated that he had sold his soul, that his powers were diabolical, and the gaunt, black-clad figure on the platform did nothing to discourage the legend. Liszt heard him, very probably at a benefit concert given in the spring of 1832, and the experience struck him like a revelation. Here was virtuosity raised to the level of myth, technical mastery so complete that it became a kind of theater, a spell cast over an entire hall. Liszt resolved on the spot to do for the piano what Paganini had done for the violin, to become, as he put it, the Paganini of the piano.

The resolution sent him into a period of furious, almost monastic practice. He shut himself away and drilled for hours every day, reinventing piano technique from the ground up, inventing fingerings and hand positions and sonorities that no one had attempted, treating the piano as an orchestra and forcing it to do things its makers had never imagined. Out of this labor came, eventually, the studies based on Paganini's caprices and the staggering difficulty of the works that made his name. The transformation of Liszt from a brilliant pianist into a transcendent one dates from the shock of hearing Paganini.

The second encounter was with Frederic Chopin, who arrived in Paris from Poland in 1831 and quickly became part of the same brilliant circle. Chopin was almost exactly Liszt's contemporary, and the two men, so different in temperament, the frail, fastidious, aristocratic Pole and the expansive, theatrical Hungarian, formed a friendship that was real even if it was never without an undercurrent of rivalry. From Chopin, Liszt learned a new refinement, a poetry of the keyboard, a way of shaping a melodic line and coloring a harmony that had nothing to do with sheer power. Chopin showed him that the piano could whisper as well as thunder, and the lesson tempered and deepened the virtuosity that Paganini had inspired.

The third encounter was with Hector Berlioz. Liszt was present at the premiere of the Symphonie fantastique, Berlioz's wild, autobiographical, opium-haunted orchestral drama, and he was overwhelmed by it. He befriended Berlioz, absorbed his revolutionary ideas about orchestral color and about music that told a story or evoked a program, and set about transcribing the entire Symphonie fantastique for solo piano, a feat of arrangement that both spread Berlioz's gospel and demonstrated Liszt's own conviction that the piano could contain a symphony. Berlioz's example, the idea that instrumental music could be charged with literary and dramatic meaning, planted the seed that would grow, two decades later, into Liszt's invention of the symphonic poem.

By the middle of the 1830s, then, the elements of the mature Liszt were assembled. He had Czerny's discipline, Salieri's craft, Paganini's example of transcendent virtuosity, Chopin's poetry, and Berlioz's vision of music as drama. He had a religious idealism that no success could quite satisfy and a social conscience sharpened by Saint-Simon and Lamennais. He was in his early twenties, magnetically handsome, famous, and emotionally unsettled. What he did not yet have was a direction, and the person who would, for better and worse, give him one was about to enter his life.

Marie D'agoult and the Great Elopement

The woman was the Countess Marie d'Agoult. Born Marie Catherine Sophie de Flavigny in 1805, the daughter of a French emigre nobleman and a German banker's family, she was six years older than Liszt, intelligent, well-read, ambitious, and unhappily married to the Count Charles d'Agoult, an older man with whom she had little in common. She and Liszt met in the salons of Paris around 1833, and what began as an attraction between two restless and dissatisfied people deepened over the following two years into a passion that neither was willing to contain.

The decision they reached was scandalous in the most literal sense: it became a public scandal, and it was meant to. In 1835 Marie d'Agoult left her husband and her position in Parisian society and went to join Liszt, and the two of them established themselves in Geneva, in Switzerland. For a married countess to abandon her husband and run away with a musician, however famous, was an act that respectable society could neither overlook nor forgive. Marie surrendered a great deal: her reputation, her standing, the ordinary securities of her class. Liszt, as a man and as an artist whose appeal was partly that of a romantic outlaw, lost much less, and the imbalance between what the two of them risked would, in the end, poison the relationship.

For a time, however, the years with Marie d'Agoult were the making of Liszt as a serious creative artist. The couple had three children, all born outside marriage and all destined to play a part in the later story. Blandine was born in Geneva in December 1835. Cosima, who would grow up to marry first the conductor Hans von Bulow and then the composer Richard Wagner, and who would become one of the most formidable figures in the cultural life of the later nineteenth century, was born on Lake Como in Italy in December 1837. Daniel, the only son, was born in Rome in 1839. The family that Liszt and Marie made together was irregular, mobile, and often unhappy, but it was during the years of their union that Liszt began, in earnest, to compose the music that would last.

In Geneva, Liszt taught at the newly founded conservatory and moved in a circle of writers and intellectuals. He and Marie read together, argued together, and traveled together through the Swiss mountains and, later, through the cities and countryside of Italy. The relationship was intense and increasingly combustible. Marie was no mere companion; she was a writer of real ability who would later publish, under the pen name Daniel Stern, novels and a respected history of the Revolution of 1848. She had her own ideas, her own pride, and her own grievances, and as the first ardor cooled, the differences between them, in temperament, in social experience, in what each wanted from life, hardened into conflict. But before the conflict consumed them, the journeys they made together gave Liszt the material for the first great achievement of his composing life.

Switzerland, Italy, and the Years of Pilgrimage

Out of the travels Liszt made with Marie d'Agoult through Switzerland and Italy came the cycle of piano pieces he eventually gathered under the title Annees de pelerinage, the Years of Pilgrimage. It is one of the supreme achievements of Romantic piano music, and it occupied Liszt, in its successive volumes and revisions, across the better part of his life. The pieces are not travel souvenirs in any trivial sense. They are meditations, responses to landscape, to literature, to art, and to religious experience, and they show Liszt discovering that the piano could be the instrument of an inward, reflective, deeply personal music utterly unlike the brilliant display pieces of his touring repertory.

The first book, devoted to Switzerland, evokes the mountains and lakes and the moods they stirred in him: the sound of a chapel bell, the murmur of a spring, the gathering of a storm, the homesickness that the German-speaking traveler called by its untranslatable name. The second book, devoted to Italy, turns from nature to art. Here Liszt responded in music to the sonnets of Petrarch, to a painting by Raphael, to a sculpture by Michelangelo, and, in the towering piece that closes the book, to the Divine Comedy of Dante, the so-called Dante Sonata, a single movement of visionary power that carries the listener from the cries of the damned to a glimpse of paradise. A later supplement, drawn from a stay at the Villa d'Este near Rome, would include the shimmering Les jeux d'eaux a la Villa d'Este, the fountains of the villa rendered in cascades of sound, a piece that pointed straight ahead to the water music of Ravel and Debussy half a century later.

The Years of Pilgrimage reveal a Liszt that the adoring concert public scarcely knew: introspective, literary, contemplative, capable of stillness. They are the answer to anyone who imagines that Liszt was merely a showman, a manufacturer of fireworks for the delight of swooning audiences. The travels with Marie d'Agoult, whatever their cost in personal happiness, gave him the experiences and the leisure out of which this music grew, and the cycle stands as the lasting monument of their years together.

Yet Liszt could not remain content with the contemplative life of the traveling composer. He was, by temperament and by training, a performer, and the platform called to him. In 1837 he returned to Paris and took part in a famous contest of pianists, a kind of public duel, against Sigismond Thalberg, the elegant and celebrated virtuoso whom Parisian opinion had begun to set up as Liszt's equal or superior. The two men played, on separate occasions and finally at the same soiree, in the salon of the Princess Cristina Belgiojoso. The princess delivered the verdict that has echoed ever since. Thalberg, she pronounced, was the first pianist in the world; Liszt was the only one. The distinction was perfect, and it settled the matter. Thalberg was supremely accomplished; Liszt was something else, something without category. The duel confirmed that no living pianist could stand beside him.

The Glittering Years of the Traveling Virtuoso

The years from roughly 1839 to 1847 are known to Liszt's biographers as the Glanzzeit, the time of splendor, the period of the great virtuoso tours, and they constitute a phenomenon for which the history of music offers no precedent. For eight years Liszt crossed and recrossed the continent of Europe almost without rest, traveling by carriage and by the new railways over distances that seem scarcely possible, and everywhere he went he produced a public excitement that contemporaries struggled to describe and that posterity has found hard to credit.

The geographic reach of these tours was astonishing. Liszt played in France, in the German states, in Austria, in England, in Scotland, in Ireland. He went south into Spain and Portugal, performing in Lisbon and in the cities of the Iberian peninsula. He went north into Denmark and into Russia, playing in Saint Petersburg and Moscow before audiences that included the imperial court. He went east into Hungary, into the lands of the Ottoman Empire, performing in Constantinople for the Sultan himself. He played in Belgium, in the Netherlands, in the Polish and Bohemian and Romanian lands of central and eastern Europe. There was hardly a corner of the continent into which the railway or the post-road could carry him that did not, at some point in those eight years, hear Franz Liszt play the piano.

The number of concerts was equally staggering. Across the Glanzzeit Liszt gave well over a thousand performances, an average that worked out to several concerts a week, sustained year after year. The physical demand alone was extraordinary; the psychological demand, the perpetual displacement, the endless hotel rooms and strange cities and new audiences to be conquered, was greater still. And the financial rewards were immense. Liszt earned, in those years, sums that no performing musician had ever earned, and he became a wealthy man.

What he did with the wealth tells as much about him as the earning of it. Liszt gave enormous quantities of money away. He was, by the testimony of everyone who knew him and by the plain record of his life, one of the most open-handed men of his age. He supported the Beethoven monument at Bonn out of his own pocket when the subscription campaign faltered. When the great fire devastated Hamburg in 1842, he gave benefit concerts for the victims. When the Danube flooded the Hungarian plain, he raised relief funds with a generosity that became famous. He paid for the educations of young musicians, supported struggling colleagues, and assisted causes of every kind. The image of the virtuoso amassing a fortune is true, but it is only half the truth; the other half is the steady, lifelong, almost compulsive giving away of what he amassed.

The performances themselves were events of a kind the world had not seen. Liszt did not merely play the piano; he commanded a hall, dominated it, transformed it into a theater of which he was the sole and absolute star. He was strikingly handsome, tall, with a leonine profile and long hair that he tossed back from his face, and he understood, as no performer before him had understood, the power of his own presence. He played with his whole body, with a physical drama that some found electrifying and others thought excessive, and he drew from the piano a volume and a brilliance and a range of color that seemed to belong to a different instrument from the one his rivals played. Pianos sometimes did not survive him; strings broke, hammers gave way, and the spectacle of Liszt destroying an instrument in the heat of performance became part of the legend.

Lisztomania and the Invention of the Piano Recital

The frenzy that surrounded Liszt during the Glanzzeit was without parallel, and it acquired, in 1844, a name. The poet Heinrich Heine, watching the spectacle with a mixture of fascination and irony, coined the term Lisztomania to describe the collective hysteria that the pianist provoked, particularly among the women of his audiences. The word was meant half as a joke, but it captured something real. Audiences did not merely applaud Liszt; they lost their composure entirely. Women fought over his handkerchiefs and his gloves. They wore his portrait in lockets and brooches. They preserved the dregs of his coffee cup and the stubs of his cigars as relics. They surged toward the platform. There were faintings, and tears, and a level of public emotion that observers compared, not always approvingly, to religious ecstasy or to outright madness.

Heine, and others, struggled to explain it. Was it the music? Was it the man? Was it some quality of the age itself, some need for an idol that the new century of crowds and newspapers and railways had created and that Liszt happened to satisfy? Whatever the cause, the phenomenon was new. There had been celebrated performers before, admired singers and instrumentalists with their followings, but there had never been anything like this, a continent-wide mania focused on a single touring musician, sustained for years, reported in every newspaper, and productive of a frenzy that crossed the line from enthusiasm into something close to delirium. Liszt was, in a sense the modern world would later make familiar, the first star, and Lisztomania was the first outbreak of the kind of mass adulation that the twentieth century would direct at film actors and popular musicians.

In the midst of this, and partly in response to it, Liszt made an innovation that permanently changed the way concert music is presented. Before Liszt, the public concert was a miscellaneous affair. A program would offer a variety of performers and pieces: an orchestral overture, perhaps, then a singer, then an instrumental soloist in one movement of a concerto, then more songs, then a virtuoso turn, the whole assembled like a variety bill. The notion that a single performer should hold the stage alone for an entire evening, playing a substantial and serious program from beginning to end, did not exist. Liszt invented it.

He began, in the late 1830s and 1840s, to give concerts in which he was the only performer, playing the whole program himself, and around 1840, in London, the term recital was first applied to one of these solo appearances. The word implied that the performer was reciting, as an actor recites, presenting a sequence of works as a unified artistic statement. Liszt also established the practice of playing from memory, without the printed score, which was then unusual and even considered presumptuous, and he set the piano on the platform sideways, with the lid raised toward the audience, so that the public could see his profile and the keyboard could project its sound into the hall. Every one of these innovations, the solo program, the performance from memory, the placement of the instrument, the very word recital, became permanent conventions of musical life. The modern piano recital, an institution still flourishing today, is Liszt's creation.

The Flood, the Sword, and the Return to Hungary

Amid the cosmopolitan triumphs of the Glanzzeit, an older and deeper loyalty reasserted itself. In 1838 catastrophic floods of the Danube devastated the Hungarian city of Pest, and Liszt, then in Vienna, responded with a series of benefit concerts that raised a remarkable sum for the relief of the victims. The episode awakened in him, with sudden force, the consciousness of where he had come from. He had left Hungary as a boy of eleven and had lived ever since in Vienna, Paris, Geneva, and on the roads of Europe. He had become a creature of French and German culture. But the flood, and the gratitude of the Hungarians for his help, reminded him that the magnates of Pressburg had launched his career, that he was a son of the Kingdom of Hungary, and that he owed that country a debt.

The return in person came a few years later and was overwhelming. When Liszt traveled to Hungary in the winter of 1839 and 1840, the nation received him as a hero. He gave concerts in Pest to ecstatic crowds. He was hailed as a Hungarian glory, a native son who had conquered the world. And in a ceremony that became famous, a delegation of Hungarian nobles presented him, in the name of the nation, with a jeweled Sword of Honor, a gesture that treated the pianist as a kind of national champion, a warrior of culture. The presentation of the sword was reported across Europe, and it drew, from some quarters, mockery; the idea of girding a pianist with a sword struck cynical observers as absurd. But to Liszt the gesture was profoundly serious. It confirmed his bond with Hungary, and he answered it in the only currency he possessed, in music.

The musical answer was the series of works that drew on what Liszt understood to be the national music of Hungary, above all the set of pieces he called the Hungarian Rhapsodies. These brilliant, fiery, instantly popular compositions were Liszt's homage to the homeland, built on the melodies, the rhythms, and the manner of the music he had heard played by the Romani, or Gypsy, ensembles of Hungary. Here a complication enters the story that later scholarship would have to untangle. Liszt believed, and argued at length in a book he published in 1859 on the Gypsies and their music in Hungary, that this Romani café music was the authentic folk music of the Hungarian nation. He was, in important respects, mistaken. The music he drew upon was largely an urban, popular, professional repertory, and the genuine peasant folk music of Hungary was a different and older thing, one that would not be properly collected and studied until the early twentieth century, by Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly. Liszt's book, into which the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein is generally thought to have introduced material that gave offense, caused lasting controversy. But the Hungarian Rhapsodies themselves, whatever the ethnographic confusion behind them, became and have remained among the best-loved music he ever wrote, and they fixed in the imagination of the world an image, however romanticized, of Hungary and its music.

The End of an Affair

The relationship with Marie d'Agoult could not survive the years of the great tours. The arithmetic of the situation was cruel. Liszt was on the road, surrounded by adulation, by temptation, and by the company of admiring women, while Marie remained behind with the children, having sacrificed her position in society for a man whose career now carried him perpetually away from her. The letters that passed between them across those years record the slow disintegration of what had once been a grand passion: reproaches, defenses, jealousies, the accumulation of small grievances into an unbridgeable estrangement. By the middle of the 1840s the union was effectively over.

The separation was not amicable, and its bitterness left a long residue. Marie d'Agoult, returning to Paris and to literary life, eventually took a measure of revenge in fiction. In 1846 she published, under her pen name Daniel Stern, a novel called Nelida, whose central figure, a gifted but ultimately weak and self-deceiving artist, was widely and correctly understood to be a portrait of Liszt, and not a flattering one. Liszt, who valued his public dignity, felt the wound. The custody and upbringing of the three children became a source of further conflict; in the end they were placed, for much of their childhood, in the care of Liszt's mother in Paris and educated under arrangements that Liszt directed, often from a distance, and that kept them apart from their own mother. The cost of the broken relationship was paid, as such costs usually are, most heavily by the children.

For Liszt the end of the affair coincided with a growing weariness of the virtuoso life itself. The endless touring, the perpetual performance of the same display pieces, the adulation that fed his vanity but starved his deeper ambition, all of it was beginning to feel like a trap. He was the most famous pianist alive, and he was beginning to suspect that being the most famous pianist alive was not enough, that it might even be a kind of failure for a man who believed, as Liszt believed, that he had been put on earth to compose. He needed a reason and an occasion to stop. Both arrived together, in the person of a small, intense, chain-smoking, immensely wealthy, and fiercely intelligent Polish-born princess whom he met in the Russian-ruled city of Kiev.

The Princess from the Ukrainian Steppe

In February of 1847 Liszt was on tour in the lands of the Russian Empire, and in the city of Kiev he gave a recital that was attended by the Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein. She had been born Carolyne Iwanowska in 1819, the only child of a wealthy Polish landowning family, and she had been married young to the Prince Nikolaus zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, a Russian officer of German princely descent. The marriage was unhappy. Carolyne was a woman of formidable intellect and overpowering will, deeply, even obsessively religious, a chain-smoker of strong cigars, a writer of vast and unreadable theological treatises, and the mistress of enormous estates in the Ukrainian provinces of the Russian Empire, worked by tens of thousands of serfs. She heard Liszt play, was overwhelmed, made a conspicuously large donation to one of his charitable causes, and contrived to meet him. Within months the two had formed an attachment that would last, with one catastrophic interruption, until the end of Liszt's life.

Carolyne's effect on Liszt was the opposite of Marie d'Agoult's. Where Marie had drawn him into the literary and social world of Paris, Carolyne pushed him relentlessly toward what she, and increasingly he, regarded as his true destiny: composition, serious work, the building of a lasting body of music. She had no interest in Liszt the touring showman. She wanted Liszt the composer, and she had the will, the wealth, and the conviction to make the transformation happen. It was Carolyne who provided the decisive push that ended the virtuoso career.

In September of 1847, in the Ukrainian town of Elisavetgrad, Franz Liszt gave a public concert as a paid performer for the last time. He was not yet thirty-six years old. He stood at the absolute summit of a profession he had, in many respects, invented, the most celebrated and best-paid instrumentalist in the history of music, and he walked away from it. He would still play the piano in public on rare occasions for the rest of his life, almost always for charity and never for a fee, but the career of the traveling virtuoso, the Glanzzeit, the Lisztomania, was over by his own deliberate choice. Ahead lay something he wanted far more and was far less certain he could achieve. He intended to become a great composer, and to make the attempt he needed a place to stand. He found it in a small town in the German state of Saxe-Weimar.

Weimar: the Court Kapellmeister

The town of Weimar, in the small German Grand Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, was a place of modest size but extraordinary cultural memory. It had been, two generations earlier, the home of Goethe and of Schiller, the seat of the most brilliant literary court in the German-speaking world, and the prestige of that golden age still clung to it. Liszt had been connected to Weimar since 1842, when the Grand Ducal court appointed him Kapellmeister in Extraordinary Service, a largely honorary title that obliged him only to appear and conduct for a few weeks each year. After he abandoned the concert platform in 1847, the title became the basis of a settled life. In 1848 Liszt took up residence in Weimar in earnest, and there, with the Princess Carolyne, who had left her husband and her Russian estates to join him, he established the household that would be the center of his work for the next thirteen years.

The Weimar years, from 1848 to 1861, were the great creative decade of Liszt's life. Freed at last from the treadmill of touring, settled in one place, supported by Carolyne's wealth and driven by her relentless conviction, he composed on a scale and at a level he had never before attained. He had a court orchestra at his disposal, a theater, and the authority of a Kapellmeister, and he used all three to pursue two intertwined ambitions: to compose original works of lasting importance, and to make Weimar a center for the most advanced and controversial music of the age.

As a conductor and administrator, Liszt turned the small Weimar theater into one of the most adventurous opera houses in Europe. He conducted a repertory that ranged from the established classics to the newest and most disputed scores, and he used his position to champion living composers whose music the larger and more cautious houses would not touch. The most consequential of these acts of advocacy came in August of 1850, when Liszt conducted, at Weimar, the world premiere of Lohengrin, the opera by Richard Wagner. Wagner himself, a political fugitive after his involvement in the Dresden uprising of 1849, was in exile and could not attend the first performance of his own work; he had to rely on Liszt to bring it before the public. The premiere of Lohengrin at Weimar is one of the landmark events of nineteenth-century music, and it was Liszt who made it happen.

Liszt also gathered around him, in Weimar, a circle of younger musicians, pupils, and disciples, and from this circle there emerged what came to be called the New German School, a loose movement, rallied around Liszt and Wagner, that stood for program music, for the union of music with poetry and drama and philosophy, for harmonic daring, and for what its adherents called the Music of the Future. The phrase, and the movement, provoked fierce opposition from more conservative musicians, who looked to Brahms and to the classical forms as the true line of musical development, and the resulting quarrel, the so-called War of the Romantics, divided the musical world of central Europe for decades. Liszt was, with Wagner, the acknowledged leader of one of the two camps, and Weimar was its headquarters.

The Invention of the Symphonic Poem

The most important single contribution Liszt made to the forms of music, as opposed to the playing of it, was the creation of the symphonic poem. The idea had been germinating in him for twenty years, ever since the encounter with Berlioz had shown him that orchestral music could carry a literary or dramatic program, ever since his own piano music had begun to respond to poems and paintings and landscapes. At Weimar, with an orchestra under his hand, he was at last able to bring the idea to maturity, and between 1848 and 1858 he composed the first twelve works of a genre that had not previously existed.

A symphonic poem, as Liszt conceived it, was a single-movement orchestral composition, free in form, whose shape was determined not by the inherited conventions of the symphony but by an extramusical idea: a poem, a play, a painting, a myth, a philosophical conception. The music did not tell the story in any literal way, note answering to event; rather, it sought to render the emotional and spiritual essence of its subject, to be the musical equivalent of the idea behind it. Liszt himself first used the term symphonische Dichtung, symphonic poem, publicly at a Weimar concert early in 1854, to describe the work that became the most famous of them all, Les preludes.

The thirteen symphonic poems, twelve from the Weimar decade and one composed much later, draw their subjects from across the whole field of European culture. Les preludes takes its starting point from a meditation on life as a series of preludes to the unknown song of death. Tasso treats the suffering and ultimate triumph of the Italian poet. Mazeppa, after a poem by Victor Hugo, depicts the wild ride of the Ukrainian hero bound to a runaway horse, an image of the artist scourged by fate and rising at last to glory. Orpheus, Prometheus, Hamlet, Hunnenschlacht, Die Ideale, Festklange, Hungaria, Heroide funebre, and the work after Hugo's lines on what is heard on the mountain complete the cycle, with the late From the Cradle to the Grave added in Liszt's final years.

To bind these free, single-movement structures together, Liszt relied on a technique that is among his most influential contributions to the craft of composition: thematic transformation. Instead of building a work from contrasting themes developed in the classical manner, Liszt would take a small number of basic musical ideas, sometimes only one, and subject them to continuous metamorphosis, altering their rhythm, their harmony, their character, their speed, so that a single germinal motif could appear as a heroic march, a tender love song, a sinister threat, and a triumphant hymn, all recognizably the same material wearing different faces. The technique gave the free forms their unity, and it proved enormously fruitful for later composers. Wagner's system of leitmotifs owes a clear debt to it; so does much of the thematic practice of Richard Strauss, of Cesar Franck, and of countless composers of program music after them. The symphonic poem itself became one of the dominant orchestral forms of the later nineteenth century, taken up by Smetana, by Tchaikovsky, by Dvorak, by Saint-Saens, by Strauss, and by Sibelius, and every one of those composers was working in a genre that Franz Liszt had invented.

The Great Works of the Weimar Decade

The symphonic poems were only one part of the torrent of music that poured out of Weimar. Liszt also composed, in those years, two large works that he called symphonies but that were as bold and unconventional as the symphonic poems themselves. The Faust Symphony, completed in the middle of the 1850s and dedicated to Berlioz, is a vast, three-movement portrait, in music, of the three central figures of Goethe's drama: Faust himself in the first movement, the gentle Gretchen in the second, and the mocking, negating Mephistopheles in the third, a movement that brilliantly parodies and distorts the Faust themes to embody the spirit that denies. The work ends with a setting, for tenor and male chorus, of the closing lines of Goethe's poem, the chorus mysticus, with its vision of the eternal feminine drawing humanity upward. The Dante Symphony, composed soon after and dedicated to Wagner, follows the poet through the Inferno and the Purgatorio of the Divine Comedy and closes with a setting of the Magnificat.

For his own instrument Liszt produced, in the Weimar years and the period immediately around them, the definitive versions of much of the music for which he is still best known. He revised and brought to their final form the Transcendental Etudes, twelve studies of legendary difficulty that are also genuine tone poems for the piano, and the studies after Paganini. He completed the great cycle of the Hungarian Rhapsodies. He brought the Annees de pelerinage closer to their final shape. He composed his two piano concertos, the brilliant and compact First in E flat and the more lyrical, single-movement Second in A major, both of them works that have never left the repertory. He wrote the Totentanz, a set of variations for piano and orchestra on the medieval plainchant Dies irae, the chant of the day of wrath, a grim and dazzling meditation on death that looks both backward to the Middle Ages and forward to the macabre experiments of his old age.

He also continued, throughout his life and with undiminished energy, the immense labor of transcription and arrangement that forms a whole department of his output. Liszt transcribed for solo piano all nine of the symphonies of Beethoven, an undertaking of staggering difficulty and devotion that made the orchestral masterpieces available, in an age before recording, to anyone with a piano and the technique to manage them. He transcribed dozens of the songs of Schubert, spreading that still underappreciated music across Europe. He made piano fantasies and paraphrases on the operas of Mozart, Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi, and Wagner, works that range from glittering display pieces to profound recompositions, of which the fantasy on Mozart's Don Giovanni and the solemn transcriptions of music from Wagner's operas are the most celebrated. To dismiss these arrangements as mere virtuoso fodder, as an older criticism sometimes did, is to misunderstand them. At their best they are acts of creative interpretation, and in their own time they were a primary means by which the musical public came to know the orchestral and operatic literature.

The Sonata in B Minor

Standing somewhat apart from the rest, and regarded by many musicians as the single greatest work Liszt ever wrote, is the Piano Sonata in B minor, completed in 1853 and published the following year with a dedication to Robert Schumann. It is a work of about half an hour's duration, played without a break, and it represents the most ambitious and the most successful application of everything Liszt had learned about form, about thematic transformation, and about the dramatic possibilities of the piano.

The Sonata is built, with extraordinary economy, from a small handful of basic motifs that are stated near the beginning and then transformed, combined, and developed across the whole vast span of the piece. What sounds, at one moment, like a figure of menace becomes, at another, a melody of the tenderest lyricism; a quiet descending scale at the very opening returns, again and again, charged each time with a different meaning. The single continuous movement contains within itself the equivalent of the several movements of a classical sonata, an opening drama, a slow song, a fugue, a recapitulation, all fused into one unbroken structure. And the work ends not with a blaze of triumph, as the conventions of the virtuoso era would have demanded, but with a long, quiet, ambiguous descent into silence, a close of haunting restraint.

When it first appeared the Sonata in B minor baffled and divided opinion. Some critics, including some who admired Liszt, found it formless, bombastic, incoherent. Brahms, to whom Liszt is said to have played it, reportedly remained unmoved. It took the better part of a century for the work to win its present, secure place near the summit of the Romantic piano repertory, recognized now as one of the masterpieces of the literature, a piece that every great pianist must eventually confront, and a structure of such originality and integrity that it influenced the building of large single-movement forms by composers as different as Schoenberg and Scriabin. That the Sonata was misunderstood at first is, in a sense, characteristic of Liszt the composer, whose original works, as opposed to his playing, often had to wait a long time for the appreciation they deserved.

The Champion of Richard Wagner

No account of Liszt's Weimar years, or indeed of his whole life, can avoid the towering and difficult presence of Richard Wagner. The relationship between the two men is one of the central facts of nineteenth-century music, and it was a relationship of enormous mutual consequence, complicated almost beyond untangling by genius, by gratitude, by exploitation, by family, and by faith.

Liszt's services to Wagner were immense and, for a long period, indispensable. He conducted the premiere of Lohengrin when no one else would. He used the prestige of Weimar, and his own unrivaled position in the musical world, to argue Wagner's cause in print and in conversation. He gave Wagner, who was a fugitive from the law and chronically, spectacularly in debt, money, again and again, over many years. He kept Wagner's music before the public during the long years of the exile, and his own compositions, the symphonic poems above all, fed directly into Wagner's harmonic and dramatic imagination; the chromatic language of Tristan und Isolde is unthinkable without the example of Liszt. Wagner himself acknowledged, in one of his more generous moods, that much of what he had become he owed to Liszt.

The personal entanglement deepened, painfully, when it crossed into family. Liszt's daughter Cosima had married, in 1857, the conductor Hans von Bulow, who was one of Liszt's own most gifted pupils and one of Wagner's most devoted champions. In the 1860s Cosima left von Bulow for Wagner, bore Wagner three children while still married to von Bulow, and in 1870, after her divorce, married Wagner. Liszt, despite his own irregular history, or perhaps because of it, was deeply distressed by the scandal and by the cruelty to von Bulow, and for several years he was estranged from both his daughter and his old friend. The breach was eventually healed, and in the last phase of his life Liszt was reconciled with Cosima and with Wagner and was a guest, honored and a little melancholy, at the new Festival Theater that Wagner had built at Bayreuth.

The reconciliation could not erase the imbalance that had always marked the friendship. Liszt gave, and Wagner took; Liszt advanced Wagner's cause tirelessly, while Wagner, supremely absorbed in his own destiny, gave back far less. By the end of his life Liszt, who was generous to a fault, felt with some bitterness that at Bayreuth he was tolerated as the great composer's father-in-law rather than honored as the composer he was himself. There is a terrible aptness in the fact that Liszt would die at Bayreuth, in the shadow of Wagner's theater, during Wagner's festival, three years after Wagner himself had died. The man who had done more than anyone to make Wagner possible ended his days as a guest in the house his own generosity had helped to build.

Family Sorrows

The Weimar years and the decade that followed brought Liszt a series of personal losses that marked him deeply and contributed to the religious turn of his later life. He had three children by Marie d'Agoult, and he was not, by any honest measure, a present or attentive father. The children were raised largely apart from both their parents, supervised by Liszt's mother and by governesses, their educations and even their marriages directed by Liszt from a distance, often with a high-handedness that caused them real unhappiness. And then, within the space of a few years, two of the three were dead.

Daniel, the only son, a young man of brilliant promise who had distinguished himself in his studies and seemed destined for an important career, fell ill and died in Berlin in 1859, at the age of twenty. He was twenty years old, and his father had scarcely known him. Three years later, in 1862, Blandine, the eldest child, married to the French politician Emile Ollivier, died in the south of France of complications following childbirth. She was twenty-six. In the space of those few years Liszt lost two of his three children, both of them young, both of them at the threshold of their adult lives, and the grief entered his music. The piano piece he wrote in memory of the dead, and the religious works of the following years, carry the weight of these losses. Of the three children only Cosima, the most formidable and the most estranged, would outlive her father, and she would live on, as the widow of Wagner and the iron mistress of the Bayreuth Festival, deep into the twentieth century.

These bereavements, together with the long, exhausting, and ultimately failed effort to marry the Princess Carolyne, pressed Liszt toward the consolations of religion that had drawn him since childhood. He had wanted to be a priest at fifteen. The desire had never entirely died. Now, in his early fifties, a man who had buried two of his children and seen his hopes of an ordinary domestic happiness frustrated, he turned again, and this time decisively, toward the Church. The next chapter of his life would be lived, in large part, in Rome, and it would begin with the most surprising transformation of a life that had never lacked for surprises.

Rome and the Taking of Holy Orders

The decision that took Liszt to Rome was, on its face, a decision about marriage. The Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein had been Liszt's companion since 1847, but she was not free to marry him. She was still, in the eyes of the Catholic Church and of the Russian state, the wife of Prince Nikolaus zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, and the obstacles to an annulment were formidable. Carolyne was a woman of obsessive determination, and she devoted years of her life, and a great deal of money, to the legal and ecclesiastical campaign to have her first marriage declared null so that she could marry Liszt with the blessing of the Church she revered above all things.

For a time the campaign seemed to succeed. After a tangle of negotiations involving church courts, the Russian authorities, and the Vatican itself, the annulment appeared to have been granted, and Liszt and Carolyne made their plans. They would be married in Rome, at the church of San Carlo al Corso, on the twenty-second of October, 1861, which was Liszt's fiftieth birthday. Liszt traveled to Rome for the wedding. The church was prepared. And then, on the very eve of the ceremony, word came that the annulment had been challenged once again, that the matter was reopened, that the marriage could not proceed. The wedding was called off, and it was never, in the end, to take place. Liszt and Carolyne would remain together, in a sense, for the rest of his life, but they would never be husband and wife, and from this point onward they largely lived apart, Carolyne settled in her apartments in Rome, surrounded by the manuscripts of the enormous religious treatise that occupied her last decades, and Liszt increasingly on the move.

Liszt remained in Rome. The city, the capital of Catholic Christendom, suited the religious longing that had been gathering in him for years, and the failed marriage seems to have freed something in him rather than crushed it. He took rooms in the city and then, seeking quiet, withdrew for a period to the monastery of the Madonna del Rosario on Monte Mario, a hill overlooking Rome, where he lived in a small cell among the monks, rising for the early offices, walking in the monastery garden, and composing religious music in an atmosphere of deliberate simplicity. The most celebrated pianist the world had ever known, the idol of Lisztomania, the man who had earned and given away fortunes, was living the life of a lay brother in a hilltop monastery.

The logical culmination of this turn came in 1865. On the twenty-fifth of April of that year Liszt received the tonsure, the symbolic cutting of the hair that marked entry into the clerical state, from the hands of a prince of the Church, Cardinal Gustav von Hohenlohe. A few months later, he received the four minor orders of the Catholic Church: porter, lector, exorcist, and acolyte. From that time forward Liszt was, in the technical language of the Church, a cleric in minor orders, and the world began to call him the Abbe Liszt. He wore the long black cassock of the abbe for the rest of his life, and the image of the elderly Liszt, gaunt, white-haired, warts on his famous face, dressed in clerical black, is the one that has come down to posterity.

It is important to be precise about what Liszt did and did not become. The minor orders were a real commitment, and Liszt took them seriously, but they did not make him a priest. He was never ordained to the priesthood; he could not say Mass or hear confessions or administer the sacraments. The minor orders did not require a vow of celibacy of the kind binding on priests, and they could, in principle, be set aside. Liszt had not renounced the world so much as he had given his lifelong religious impulse a formal, visible shape. He remained an artist; he continued to compose, to teach, and to travel; he continued, on occasion, to enjoy the company and the admiration of women and the comforts of cultivated society. The Abbe Liszt was a genuine expression of a genuine faith, but he was not a withdrawal from the life of music. He was, rather, the strange and characteristic compromise of a man who had wanted, since the age of fifteen, to be both an artist and a servant of God, and who had finally found a way, imperfect and much remarked upon, to be both at once.

The Sacred Music and the Oratorios

The Roman years, and the religious turn they represented, gave Liszt the impulse for a great body of sacred music, and although this part of his output is less often performed than the piano works and the symphonic poems, it was, for Liszt himself, among the most important work of his life. He had long believed that the church music of his own day had fallen into a feeble, sentimental, theatrical condition, and that it needed to be reformed and renewed, made worthy again of its sacred purpose. The sacred works of his later years were his attempt to carry out that renewal.

The two largest of them are oratorios. The Legend of Saint Elizabeth, composed across the years around 1860, tells in music the story of the medieval Elizabeth of Hungary, the princess who gave her life to charity and was canonized for her holiness, a subject that united Liszt's religious devotion with his Hungarian patriotism. The far more ambitious Christus, completed in the middle of the 1860s and first performed complete at Weimar in 1873, is an immense setting, drawn from the Latin liturgy and the Scriptures, of the life of Jesus Christ, from the prophecies of his coming through the Christmas oratorio of his birth, the events of his ministry and Passion, and the triumph of the Resurrection. Christus is one of the great religious works of the nineteenth century, and Liszt regarded it as a summit of his achievement, though it has never won the wide public that its quality deserves.

Alongside the oratorios Liszt composed a series of large works for the Catholic liturgy. The Missa solennis, known as the Gran Mass, was written for the consecration of the great basilica at Esztergom, the primatial see of the Hungarian Church, and is a setting of the Mass of monumental scale and dramatic power. The Hungarian Coronation Mass was composed for a moment of high national importance, the coronation in 1867 of the Emperor Franz Joseph as King of Hungary, the ceremony that sealed the compromise creating the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Liszt also set numerous Psalms, composed shorter liturgical pieces, and, near the end of his life, wrote the austere and deeply moving Via Crucis, a setting of the fourteen Stations of the Cross for chorus and organ that is one of the most remarkable and forward-looking of all his works, stripped to essentials, harmonically strange, charged with a grief and a faith that need no display.

The sacred music shows a side of Liszt that the legend of the flamboyant virtuoso tends to obscure. It is often restrained, often archaic in its leanings, drawing on plainchant and on the older traditions of church music, and it is always serious. Liszt put into it his deepest convictions, and the relative neglect of this music by the concert world is one of the standing injustices of his posthumous reputation. The man who wrote the Hungarian Rhapsodies and the dazzling operatic fantasies also wrote, in the same lifetime, some of the most sincere and searching religious music of his century, and both are fully Liszt.

The Threefold Life

The pattern of Liszt's final years was set in 1869, and it was a pattern of perpetual motion. In that year Liszt, who had been living quietly in Rome, was invited to return to Weimar, the scene of his great creative decade, to give instruction to young pianists. He accepted, and from then until his death he divided his life among three cities, an arrangement that he himself, with a wry sense of its absurdity, called his vie trifurquee, his threefold or three-pronged life.

The three poles of this existence were Rome, Weimar, and Budapest. In Rome, Liszt was the Abbe, close to the center of the Catholic world, near the Princess Carolyne and the religious life that had drawn him there. In Weimar, he was the venerated master, holding court in a modest house, the Hofgartnerei, where young musicians from across Europe and from America gathered around him. In Budapest, he was the national glory of Hungary, the founding president of the country's new music academy, the living embodiment of Hungarian musical pride. Each year Liszt traveled the long circuit among these three cities, and in between he made countless other journeys, to festivals, to concerts of his music, to friends, so that the last seventeen years of his life were spent, to an astonishing degree, in railway carriages and hotel rooms.

It was an exhausting way for an aging man to live, and Liszt was no longer young; he turned sixty in 1871 and felt the weight of his years. But the threefold life was also, in its way, a fitting summation of everything he had been. Liszt had never belonged to one place. He had been born in Hungary, made in Vienna and Paris, fulfilled in Weimar, and consecrated in Rome, and the vie trifurquee, ceaselessly carrying him among the German, the Hungarian, and the Roman poles of his identity, was the outward form of an inner truth. He was a European before the word carried its modern political meaning, a man who belonged to a whole civilization rather than to any single nation within it, and he spent his last years physically enacting that belonging, an old priest in a black cassock forever boarding another train.

Through all of it he kept working. He continued to compose, and the music of these final years, as we shall see, was among the strangest and most prophetic he ever wrote. He continued to teach, giving freely and tirelessly of his time to the young. He continued to promote the music of others, to attend to a vast correspondence, to receive the endless stream of visitors who came to pay homage. And he continued to be honored. He was loaded with decorations, with honorary memberships, with the formal tributes that a long and famous life attracts. But the honors could not disguise, and Liszt himself did not try to disguise, a deepening current of sadness in these last years, a sense of isolation, of outliving his time, of a music misunderstood and a life that had given far more than it had received.

The Founding of the Hungarian Academy of Music

Of the three cities of Liszt's threefold life, it was Budapest that received from him the most lasting institutional gift. Liszt's bond with Hungary, awakened by the Danube flood relief of 1838 and sealed by the Sword of Honor of 1840, never weakened, and in the last phase of his life he was able to repay the debt in the most concrete way possible, by helping to give his homeland a permanent center for the training of its musicians.

In 1875 the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music was founded in Budapest. It was established with the support of the Hungarian government, and Liszt, the most famous musician the country had ever produced, was the natural and inevitable choice to lend it his authority and his name. He was appointed the institution's first president, and the Hungarian composer Ferenc Erkel, the father of Hungarian national opera, served as its director, responsible for the day-to-day running of the school. Liszt did not merely lend his name. When he was in Budapest, as he was for a portion of every year, he taught at the Academy, and he gave to it the same generous, unpaid devotion that he gave to all his teaching. He helped to shape its curriculum and its character in its crucial first decade.

The institution Liszt helped to found has endured and flourished. It exists today as the Franz Liszt Academy of Music, one of the most distinguished conservatories in Europe, and across nearly a century and a half it has trained generation after generation of Hungarian musicians. From its halls, in the years after Liszt's death, would come the two men, Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, who finally accomplished what Liszt himself, for all his love of Hungary, had not, the patient, scientific collection and study of the genuine peasant folk music of the Hungarian and the neighboring peoples, the music that would refresh and transform European composition in the twentieth century. There is a real continuity, institutional and spiritual, between the old Abbe presiding over the new Academy in the 1870s and the modern Hungarian musical tradition. It was, of all Liszt's many acts of generosity, perhaps the most far-sighted, a gift not to an individual or to a single cause but to a nation and to its future.

The Master Teacher and His Disciples

If Liszt had never composed a note, he would still occupy a major place in musical history as a teacher, for in the last decades of his life he trained, directly and by example, a substantial part of the leading pianists of the following generation, and he did so according to principles that were as remarkable as his playing had ever been.

The first of those principles was that he would not take money for it. Liszt had earned more from the piano than any performer in history, and he had given most of it away; now, in his old age, he gave away his teaching as well. The young pianists who gathered around him in Weimar, in Rome, and in Budapest paid nothing. To accept a fee for instruction, Liszt held, would be to demean the relationship between a master and the young artists he was helping into the world. This refusal was widely known and much admired, and it drew to him a constant flow of gifted students, for whom study with Liszt was both the highest possible distinction and, uniquely among the great teachers, free.

The second principle concerned the nature of the teaching itself. Liszt did not run a conventional class. He did not, in the main, drill technique; he expected the young people who came to him to arrive already in command of their instrument, and he turned away those who were not ready. What he gave was something rarer: he taught interpretation, musicianship, artistry, the things that cannot be reduced to exercises. The Weimar masterclasses, held in the music room of the Hofgartnerei, became legendary. A circle of students would gather; one would play; Liszt would listen, then comment, then perhaps go to the piano himself and, in a few phrases, reveal a depth in the music that the young player had not imagined. He could be encouraging and he could be devastating; his wit was famous and not always gentle. But the experience of playing for Liszt, and of hearing him play, was for those who passed through that room the formative event of their musical lives.

The roll of Liszt's pupils is extraordinary. It includes Hans von Bulow, who became one of the greatest conductors of the century; Carl Tausig, regarded by Liszt himself as perhaps the most naturally gifted of them all, dead tragically young; Eugen d'Albert; Emil von Sauer; Moriz Rosenthal; Alexander Siloti, who would carry the Liszt tradition into Russia and teach it, in turn, to the young Rachmaninoff; Arthur Friedheim; Frederic Lamond; Sophie Menter; Jose Vianna da Motta of Portugal; and many more, of many nationalities, including a steady stream of Americans who crossed the Atlantic to sit in the master's room. Through these pupils, and through their pupils after them, a direct line of descent runs from Liszt into the pianism of the twentieth century and beyond. A great many of the most admired pianists of the modern age can trace their artistic genealogy, teacher by teacher, back to the masterclasses of the Abbe Liszt. He had said, in effect, that the gift he had received must be passed on, and he passed it on with both hands.

The Prophetic Late Works

The music that Liszt composed in the last decade and a half of his life is one of the most astonishing chapters in the whole history of European composition, and for a long time it was almost entirely unknown. While the public went on associating the name of Liszt with the brilliance of the Hungarian Rhapsodies and the thunder of the virtuoso years, the old man was quietly writing, mostly for the piano, a series of short, strange, severe pieces that seemed to belong not to his own century but to the one that was coming.

The late works are stripped of display. They are often very short, often very quiet, often harmonically so adventurous that they hover at the edge of tonality itself and sometimes step over it. In a piece called Nuages gris, Grey Clouds, Liszt wrote music of a desolate, drifting, unresolved bleakness, built on harmonies that do not progress in the old way and that simply dissolve. In the two pieces called La lugubre gondola, the funeral gondola, written in Venice not long before Wagner's death there, he seemed to compose a premonition of that death, a slow, black, swaying music of mourning. In the piece he called, with grim wit, the Bagatelle sans tonalite, the Bagatelle without tonality, he wrote a whole composition that declines to settle in any key at all, an experiment in atonality made decades before the word was coined. In Unstern, the ill-starred, in the Csardas macabre, in works that brood on death and on the failure of his hopes, the old Liszt explored a harmonic and emotional world that his contemporaries were simply not equipped to hear.

These pieces were not performed and not published in any general way during Liszt's lifetime. They were, in the most literal sense, ahead of their time, and the time they were ahead of can be named with some precision. The whole-tone scales, the unresolved dissonances, the bare textures, the refusal of conventional closure, the exploration of harmony as color rather than as function, all of this points directly forward. It points to the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel; it points to the expressionism of the early Schoenberg and his circle; it points to Bartok, to the harmonic experiments of the new century. Musicians and scholars who came to know these late pieces in the twentieth century recognized, with something like shock, that the aged Liszt, working alone and unregarded in his rooms in Weimar and Rome and Budapest, had heard the future and had written it down.

There is something moving, and something characteristic, in the spectacle of the most famous performer of his age, in his last years, composing music that no audience of his age could be brought to hear, music written, as it were, for listeners not yet born. The young Liszt had conquered the public utterly. The old Liszt, having given the public everything it wanted for decades, finally turned away from it and wrote, in solitude and a kind of austere freedom, only what his own inner ear demanded. The prophetic late works are the proof that the restless, experimenting, forward-driving creative mind that had invented the symphonic poem and the modern recital was active to the very end, and that Liszt, who had been so completely a man of his own century, was also, in his final phase, a true precursor of the next.

The Final Summer and Death at Bayreuth

The last years were shadowed by infirmity and by sorrow. Liszt's eyesight was failing him; cataracts clouded his vision and made reading and writing, and the study of music, increasingly difficult. He suffered from dropsy, the swelling caused by a failing heart and circulation, and from the general decline of a body that had been driven hard for three-quarters of a century. He was subject to spells of deep depression, and he is known to have drunk heavily in these years, seeking in brandy a relief from the melancholy that had settled over him. He spoke, in his letters and to his friends, of weariness, of a wish for the end, of a sense that he had outlived his welcome in the world. He continued, even so, to teach, to travel, and to compose, but the gaiety and the inexhaustible energy of the earlier Liszt had given way to something graver and sadder.

In the summer of 1886 Liszt undertook what would be his last journey. He had been in England, where a long-delayed recognition of his music was at last under way and where his oratorio was performed and his presence celebrated; the visit was a triumph, and it pleased him. From there his itinerary led, by way of Paris and other stops, toward Bayreuth, in the Kingdom of Bavaria, where his daughter Cosima, the widow of Richard Wagner, presided over the festival that her late husband had founded. Wagner had died three years earlier, in 1883, and the Bayreuth Festival was now Cosima's domain, the temple of the Wagnerian cult, and she expected her father to attend.

Liszt arrived at Bayreuth already unwell. He had caught a cold on his travels, and the cold, in a man of seventy-four with a weak heart, was dangerous. At Bayreuth he attended performances of Wagner's operas, including Tristan und Isolde, the very work whose harmonic language he had done so much, through his own music, to make possible. But his condition worsened. The cold deepened into pneumonia. He was lodged in a house in the town, attended by doctors and by his daughter, and through the last days of July 1886 he sank steadily. On the night of the thirty-first of July, 1886, in Bayreuth, Franz Liszt died. He was seventy-four years old. Those at his bedside reported that one of the last words to pass his lips was the name Tristan.

He was buried in the municipal cemetery at Bayreuth. There was, after his death, a strong desire in Hungary that the remains of the nation's greatest musician should be brought home to Budapest, and the question of where Liszt ought finally to rest was disputed for many years. But the wish of the Bayreuth establishment prevailed, and Liszt's body was never repatriated. He lies still in the German town that his son-in-law had made famous, the cosmopolitan musician who had called himself a Hungarian to the end, buried at last in the shadow of Wagner's theater. The Princess Carolyne, in Rome, outlived him by only a few months; she completed at last the enormous religious work that had occupied her for decades, and died in 1887.

The Measure of the Music

To take the measure of Liszt the composer, as distinct from Liszt the performer and Liszt the legend, is a task that the musical world was slow to undertake and has perhaps not entirely completed even now. For a long time the dazzle of the virtuoso obscured the seriousness of the creator. Liszt was so overwhelmingly famous as a pianist, and the showpieces of his virtuoso years were so widely played, that the temptation was always to file him as a brilliant manufacturer of effects rather than as a composer of substance and originality. That judgment was unjust, and the slow correction of it is one of the quiet stories of modern musical scholarship.

The body of work Liszt left is enormous and uneven. It runs to more than seven hundred compositions, and not all of them are masterpieces; Liszt wrote a great deal, he revised endlessly, and the virtuoso showpieces and the lesser occasional works are mixed in with the music of permanent value. But the music of permanent value is abundant, and it is more varied than the popular image of Liszt allows. There is the Sonata in B minor, which is now securely placed among the supreme achievements of the Romantic piano. There are the Years of Pilgrimage, a cycle of contemplative depth and poetic refinement that ranks with the finest piano music of the century. There are the Transcendental Etudes, which are not merely difficult but genuinely imaginative. There are the two piano concertos and the Totentanz, which have never left the repertory. There are the thirteen symphonic poems, the genre he invented, and the two great program symphonies on Faust and on Dante. There is the immense body of sacred music, the oratorio Christus above all, still waiting for the wider recognition it deserves. There are the songs, more than seventy of them, a neglected treasure. There are the transcriptions, that vast and learned act of musical citizenship. And there are the prophetic late pieces, the most forward-looking music written by any major composer of the nineteenth century.

The innovations alone would secure Liszt's place. He invented the symphonic poem, and through it shaped the course of orchestral music for half a century and more. He perfected the technique of thematic transformation, which fed directly into Wagner and into the whole later practice of program music. He carried harmony, especially in the late works, to the threshold of atonality, anticipating the most radical developments of the twentieth century. He expanded the technical and coloristic resources of the piano so far that he effectively redefined what the instrument could do, and every pianist since has played, in a sense, the instrument that Liszt reimagined. And he did all of this while also being, by common consent, the greatest executant the piano has ever known. The combination, of supreme performing genius with genuine and far-reaching creative originality, is something close to unique in the history of music.

The Revolution in Piano Playing

It is worth dwelling, separately, on what Liszt did to the playing of the piano itself, because the instrument as it is understood and used today was, to a degree that is easily forgotten, remade by him. When Liszt was a boy, the piano was still a relatively recent and rapidly changing instrument, and the manner of playing it was inherited largely from the practice of the harpsichord and the early fortepiano: a style of clean, even, finger-based passagework, elegant rather than powerful, suited to the salon and the drawing room more than to the great public hall. The piano had not yet become the orchestra-in-a-box, the instrument of vast sonority and color, that the nineteenth century would make of it. Liszt, more than any single figure, made it so.

The transformation began, as we have seen, with the shock of Paganini, and it was carried through in the years of furious, secluded practice that followed. What Liszt worked out in those years was nothing less than a new physical approach to the keyboard. He recognized that the modern piano, with its iron frame and its powerful action, could be played not merely with the fingers but with the whole arm, the whole body, the full weight of the player brought to bear; that it could produce not only delicacy and evenness but thunder, brilliance, and an enormous dynamic range; that it could imitate the horn and the string section and the full orchestral tutti; that it could sustain long singing melodies in one register while surrounding them with shimmering figuration in another. He developed fingerings and hand positions and techniques of leaping, of rapid octaves, of interlocking hands, of glittering tremolo and cascading arpeggio, that simply had not existed before, and he embodied them in music, above all in the Transcendental Etudes, that demanded the new technique in order to be played at all.

The point of all this was never mere difficulty for its own sake, though Liszt's music is certainly difficult and the legend of its difficulty has sometimes obscured its substance. The point was expressive range. Liszt wanted the piano to be able to say everything, to contain a symphony, to evoke a landscape, to whisper a prayer and to depict the ride of a doomed hero and the fires of the Inferno. The technical revolution he carried out was in the service of that expressive ambition, and it succeeded so completely that it became invisible. The piano music of every composer who came after him, of Brahms in his own different way, of the Russians, of the impressionists, of the whole modern repertory, presupposes the instrument and the technique that Liszt established. When a pianist today sits down to play, the instrument under the hands, and the physical vocabulary the hands employ, descend in a direct and traceable line from the work that the young Liszt did, alone, in the early 1830s, after a violinist from Genoa had shown him what a human being might do with an instrument and an audience.

The Question of a Homeland

One thread runs through the whole of Liszt's life and is never quite resolved, and it deserves to be drawn out on its own, because it tells us something essential about the man and about the age he lived in. That thread is the question of where, exactly, Franz Liszt belonged. He was born in the Kingdom of Hungary and he insisted, to the end of his days, that he was a Hungarian. He signed himself, in the Hungarian fashion, with the family name first, Liszt Ferenc. He wore the Sword of Honor of Hungary as a sacred trust. He composed the Hungarian Rhapsodies, the Hungarian Coronation Mass, the symphonic poem Hungaria, and the oratorio on the Hungarian Saint Elizabeth. He gave his last great institutional gift to Hungary in the form of the Budapest academy. His patriotism was real, sustained, and expressed in act after act across seventy years.

And yet the matter is genuinely complicated. The village of his birth was German-speaking, and German was the language of his childhood home. He grew up and was educated in Vienna and Paris; French became the language in which he was most fluent and most at ease, the language of his letters and his conversation and his prose writings. He never, despite repeated good intentions, mastered the Hungarian language; he could not conduct an ordinary conversation in the tongue of the nation he claimed as his own. He spent the overwhelming majority of his adult life outside Hungary, in France, in Switzerland, in the German states, in Italy. His music, for all the Hungarian works, is rooted in the broad European tradition, in the Viennese classics, in French and Italian opera, in German Romanticism. By the ordinary tests of language and residence, Liszt was less a Hungarian than a man of the whole of Europe.

The honest conclusion is that he was both, and that the apparent contradiction is not really a contradiction at all but a faithful portrait of a particular kind of nineteenth-century life. Liszt belonged to the multinational empire of central Europe, the world in which a German-speaking child could be born a subject of the Hungarian crown, be trained in the imperial capital, make his career in France, and feel, with complete sincerity, that all of these were his. His Hungarian identity was a matter of loyalty, of gratitude, of chosen allegiance, rather than of language or domicile, and it was no less real for that; if anything, a homeland that one chooses and serves, rather than merely inhabits, is claimed more deeply. At the same time his cosmopolitanism, his ease in many cities and cultures, his sense of belonging to music itself rather than to any one nation's version of it, was equally genuine. Liszt was, in the most generous sense, a European, at a moment when that identity could still be held together with a passionate local patriotism rather than set against it. The question of his homeland has no single answer, and the absence of a single answer is itself the answer: he was a Hungarian, and he was a citizen of the whole of Europe, and the two things, in him, were one.

Character, Generosity, and Contradiction

Franz Liszt was a man of vivid and not always consistent character, and any honest account of him must hold his virtues and his faults together, because in him they were closely intertwined. He was, beyond any serious dispute, one of the most generous human beings ever to occupy a position of fame and wealth. The generosity ran through every part of his life. He gave away money, on a scale and with a constancy that exhausts the telling: to flood victims and fire victims, to monuments and music schools, to struggling composers and needy students and total strangers with a plausible tale of misfortune. He gave away his teaching, refusing for decades to take a penny for the instruction that the foremost pianists of the next generation came to him to receive. He gave away his time and his influence, championing the music of others with an ungrudging enthusiasm that has no parallel among great composers. He conducted their premieres, transcribed their music, argued their case, lent them his unmatched prestige. The list of those he helped is a roll call of nineteenth-century music: Wagner above all, but also Berlioz, Schumann, Grieg, Smetana, Borodin and the Russian nationalists, the young and the unknown beyond counting.

He had, too, a personal warmth and a charm that everyone who met him remarked upon, an ability to make the person before him feel, for the duration of the conversation, that he or she was the most interesting person in the world. He was witty, cultivated, and widely read. He carried his enormous fame with a courtesy and a lack of pettiness that contemporaries found striking, especially by contrast with the prickly and self-absorbed Wagner.

And yet the contradictions were real. The man who was so generous to strangers and to the world of music was a distant and often careless father, who left his children to be raised by others and intervened in their lives, when he did intervene, with a heavy and sometimes hurtful hand; the early deaths of Daniel and Blandine came before he had ever truly known them. The man who took holy orders and wore the cassock of the abbe had been, and to some degree remained, a man of the world, fond of admiration, not immune to vanity, not always continent in his attachments; his religion was sincere, but it coexisted, awkwardly and humanly, with the appetites and the self-regard of a lifelong star. He could be vain about his appearance and his effect. He could improve a good story, including the story of Beethoven's kiss, until it served his sense of his own destiny. He was, in short, neither the plaster saint that his admirers sometimes wished to make of him nor the shallow showman that his detractors alleged, but something more interesting than either: a large, generous, gifted, divided man, who spent his whole life trying to reconcile the artist and the believer, the performer and the priest, the lover of the world and the servant of God, and who never entirely succeeded, and never entirely stopped trying.

Legacy and Influence

The influence of Franz Liszt on the music that came after him is so pervasive that it is easy to underestimate, simply because so much of it has become the common property of the art. When a single performer walks onto a stage and holds a hall alone for an evening, playing a serious program from memory, that performer is doing what Liszt invented and is using the word, recital, that attached itself to Liszt's solo concerts. When a composer writes a single-movement orchestral work shaped by a poem or a story or a painting, that composer is working in the genre, the symphonic poem, that Liszt created at Weimar. When themes are transformed and metamorphosed across a large structure to give it unity, the technique is the one Liszt perfected. These things are now so basic to musical life that their origin in one man's restless invention is half-forgotten, which is itself a measure of how deeply Liszt's legacy is woven into the fabric of music.

The direct line of descent through his pupils carried his pianism into the twentieth century and beyond; a great proportion of the modern world's distinguished pianists can trace their teachers back, link by link, to the masterclasses of Weimar. The symphonic poem he invented was taken up by Smetana, Tchaikovsky, Dvorak, Saint-Saens, Franck, Richard Strauss, Sibelius, and many others, and dominated orchestral program music for two generations. His harmonic daring fed Wagner, and through Wagner the whole later course of chromatic music; his late experiments fed, directly, the impressionists and the early modernists. Bartok, the supreme Hungarian composer of the next century, revered Liszt and defended the originality of his harmony when it was still fashionable to disparage it. The Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest, the institution he helped to found, stands as a living monument, and the Liszt societies, competitions, and festivals that flourish around the world keep his memory and his music in active circulation.

There remains the matter of the unfinished recognition. Liszt the pianist was never in doubt; his supremacy at the keyboard was acknowledged in his lifetime and has never been questioned since. Liszt the composer has had a longer and harder road. For decades after his death the serious musical world tended to honor the performer and patronize the creator, to play the Hungarian Rhapsodies and the showpieces while neglecting the Sonata, the symphonic poems, the sacred music, the songs, and the prophetic late works. That imbalance has been steadily corrected over the past century, as scholars, performers, and the great Liszt biography of recent decades have made the full range and the genuine seriousness of his output impossible to ignore. The sacred music, in particular the oratorio Christus, still awaits its due. But the general verdict has shifted, and decisively. Franz Liszt is now understood for what he was: not a showman who happened to compose, but one of the central and most original creative figures of the nineteenth century, a man who changed the playing of music, the writing of music, the teaching of music, and the very idea of what a musician could be.

CONCLUSION

The life of Franz Liszt covered seventy-four years and most of a continent, and it is hard to think of another musician whose career touched so many aspects of the art. He was the child prodigy launched by the patronage of Hungarian noblemen, the pupil of Beethoven's own pupil, the boy composer whose opera was staged at the Paris Opera. He was the grieving adolescent who wanted to be a priest, the young Romantic transfigured by Paganini, the friend of Chopin and Berlioz, the lover whose elopement scandalized Paris. He was the traveling virtuoso who provoked Lisztomania across Europe, who invented the modern recital, who earned fortunes and gave them away, and who then, at the height of his powers and his fame, deliberately walked off the concert platform forever because he wanted to compose. He was the Weimar Kapellmeister who invented the symphonic poem, championed Wagner, and produced in a single decade the Sonata in B minor, the Faust and Dante symphonies, the twelve symphonic poems, and the definitive versions of the Transcendental Etudes and the Hungarian Rhapsodies. He was the Abbe Liszt of the Roman years, the composer of Christus and the Via Crucis. He was the tireless old master of the threefold life, the unpaid teacher of a generation of pianists, the founding president of the Hungarian Academy of Music, and, in solitude, the author of the strange prophetic pieces that heard the coming century before it arrived.

Through all the transformations, certain things held constant. There was the generosity, which never failed, the lifelong, almost helpless impulse to give away money, time, influence, and art. There was the religious longing, present in the sickly child, suppressed in the young virtuoso, triumphant at last in the cassock of the abbe, and audible in the sacred music that he valued above his more famous works. There was the restless creative intelligence, never satisfied, always pressing forward, inventing new forms and new sounds at an age when most artists are content to repeat themselves. And there was the conviction, formed in the boy at Pressburg and never abandoned, that a great gift carries a great obligation, that the talent he had been given was not his to hoard but his to spend, in the service of music and of others.

Franz Liszt died at Bayreuth in the summer of 1886, an old priest in a black cassock, weary and a little forgotten, during the festival of the son-in-law whose fame his own generosity had helped to build. But the verdict of the world he left behind has risen steadily ever since. The recital he invented is performed every night somewhere on earth. The symphonic poem he created reshaped the orchestral music of his century. The pianists he taught carried his art into ours. And the music itself, the Sonata, the Years of Pilgrimage, the symphonic poems, the late pieces that look across the threshold of the twentieth century, has at last taken the place that its creator believed, with a faith that the world was slow to share, it would one day occupy. The boy from the Hungarian village had wished to be remembered not as the greatest pianist who ever lived, though he was that, but as a composer who mattered. A century and more after his death, that wish has been granted.

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