Franz Liszt Overview

At age 12, Franz Liszt performed a rendition of Beethoven's "Symphony in C-minor" as the master composer sat in the audience. Legend has it that after the superb performance, the great maestro kissed the juvenile Liszt on the forehead. Liszt's future... [more]

At age 12, Franz Liszt performed a rendition of Beethoven's "Symphony in C-minor" as the master composer sat in the audience. Legend has it that after the superb performance, the great maestro kissed the juvenile Liszt on the forehead. Liszt's future as the most brilliant of pianists seemed to be sealed. But it was as an inventor and visionary, not as an interpreter, that the Hungarian-born pianist was to be known. The composer made a name for himself with formal innovations such as in his "Piano Concerto No. One in E-Flat." In a departure from the norm, Liszt wrote three of the four movements without a break and joined them together in form as well as theme. "This kind of binding together and rounding off a piece at its close is somewhat my own," Liszt noted, "but it is quite organic and justified from the standpoint of musical form." Liszt continued to experiment with theme and narration in what is perhaps his most important work, "Totentanz, or Dance of Death." The dark piece pits the piano against the orchestra to evoke the hapless struggle for life that death arouses. With the somber tones of inevitable mortality, "Totentanz" is actually a set of variations on "Dies Irae," a thirteenth-century Latin chant that describes the terrors of the Last Judgment. With "Totentanz," Liszt invented a new musical form, the symphonic poem. The composer was reportedly deeply concerned with the issue of mortality. He lived in Paris in 1832, the time of a great cholera outbreak. According to the poet Heinrich Heine, Liszt was "a frequent visitor to the home of Victor Hugo, where he would play the 'Funeral March' from Beethoven's 'Sonata in A-flat' while all the dead from cholera filed past to Notre Dame in their shrouds." In deep morbid chords, the composer was bent on dancing the story of death. The Russian composer Alexander Borodin praised "Totentanz" as "the most powerful of all works for piano and orchestra for its originality of idea and form, for the beauty, depth, and power of its theme, the novelty of its instrumentation, its profoundly religious and mystical sentiment, its Gothic and liturgical character." Liszt experimented with form, composed pieces that were quite dependent on maintaining a consistent theme, and penned some of the most technically complex pieces ever written for piano. He is thought by many to have been not only the greatest pianist in history but also a vital avant-garde influence in nineteenth-century music. [show less]