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.