~ Liszt, Franz ~
Born: 1811 in Raiding (Hungary)
Died: 1886 in Weimar (Germany)
Liszt was a major figure in 19th-century music, an innovator in
the way he combined a fierce and unquenchable creative fire with a fully
developed connoisseur's appreciation of both the music of contemporary
composers and of giant figures from the past.
The only child of Adam and Anna Liszt, Franz was born in Raiding,
Hungary. The small town came under the administrative aegis of the Esterházy
family who employed Adam as a steward. Franz showed musical promise early,
beginning lessons with his father before he was six; by the age of seven
he was writing music. Three years later the boy was ready to make his concert
début in the nearby town of Sopron. This was followed by two more
concerts performed before the cream of Austrian society. As a direct result,
young Franz was given an annual stipend for six years to enable him to
concentrate solely on a musical career. His father secured Karl Czerny,
an ex-pupil of Beethoven, as Franz's piano teacher, while Antonio Salieri
taught him theory. As both Czerny and Salieri lived in Vienna, the family
moved there in 1821.
During his time in Vienna Liszt had the good fortune to meet Beethoven,
who although profoundly deaf, attended one of his concerts and bestowed
his blessing on the boy. Franz's reputation spread quickly, and before
the end of 1821 he had been chosen as one of 50 composers (others included
Beethoven, Czerny and Salieri) to write a set of variations to a waltz
written by the composer/publisher Diabelli. By the autumn of 1823 Franz's
father decided it was time to widen his son's audience and moved the family
to Paris. Liszt took the Parisians by storm. He also completed his musical
education by taking private lessons from Anton Reicha and Ferdinando Paer.
A visit to London in 1824 was a triumph, crowned by a private concert
before George IV. By late 1825 Franz had even composed a one-act opera,
Don Sanche, which was premièred in Paris to a mixed reaction. The
next two years brought constant travel through much of Europe, financial
rewards and the premières of a stream of juvenile works, few of
which have survived in their original form. By the summer of 1827 Franz,
still only 16, was exhausted and took to his bed in Paris. Doctors recommended
a cure at the baths in Boulogne, to which both father and son repaired.
Shortly after their arrival, Franz's father, aged 51, died from typhoid.
This shocking event forced Liszt to re-evaluate his existence.
Already deeply disaffected with the life of a touring virtuoso, he found
the prospect of prolonging it repugnant. For him, music was a noble calling;
being "a musician in the employ of the rich, who patronized me and paid
me like an itinerant entertainer" he felt to be degrading. Arranging for
his mother to join him in Paris, he earned a living by teaching piano to
the children of the rich and influential, falling deeply in love with the
16-year-old daughter of a cabinet minister. Though his feelings were reciprocated,
her father objected and the girt was quickly married off to a socially
acceptable suitor. Liszt never forgot her, even making provision for her
in his will. For several years he withdrew from the world, and even considered
entering a seminary. He had lost the way forward. It took the 1830 revolution
in France to present him with a solution.
For a young man with a passionate commitment to social equality
and democracy, the overthrow of an autocratic monarch was profoundly inspiring:
he immediately planned a Revolutionary symphony to express his sentiments,
and although he never progressed very far with the idea, it had the effect
of bringing him out into the world again. A series of musical events in
1830-31 cemented his renewed ties with humanity and confirmed the form
his artistic voice would take. Attending the first performance of Berlioz's
Symphonie fantastique, Liszt was overwhelmed by the vivid expression of
such turbulent ideas and emotions. He applauded wildly according to Berlioz,
dragging him off "for dinner at his house and overwhelming me with his
enthusiasm". The two became friends, Liszt learning a great deal from Berlioz
about scoring for an orchestra. Three months later he was in the audience
at Paganini's Paris de' but. Once again he was overwhelmed, this time by
the sheer demonic pitch of Paganini's virtuosity, and his charismatic presence.
Soon after the concert, he began work on the first Etudes d'exécution
transcendent d'après Paganini, works long regarded as a set of impossibly
difficult piano pieces.
At the end of 1831 Frédéric Chopin (then aged 21)
arrived in Paris and held his first concert. Liszt was again present and,
true to his open nature, immediately declared his belief in Chopin's genius,
a belief which was never shaken. All these composers helped define the
approach Liszt took towards his own compositional wizardry and helped him
to mould his talents until his audiences became as possessed by his music
as himself. But it required one more event to put all these encounters
into perspective: in 1B33 Liszt, still only 22, fell in love with Countess
Marie d'Agoult, a married woman of 28. The impact was mutual. Marie recorded
her feelings for him: "With passion he uttered thoughts and opinions totally
strange to ears like mine, accustomed as they were to hearing only banal,
conventional views". Although deeply moved, Marie delayed for over a year.
They finally eloped to Switzerland, where for the next four years they
lived together, Marie producing two daughters (Blandine and Cosima) and
one son (Daniel), and Franz composing and enlarging his intellectual horizons.
He also gave the occasional concert. By 1838 Liszt was travelling more
widely; his ardour for Marie had cooled. By the end of 1839 they were living
apart, Marie in Paris while Liszt continued to develop his concert career.
Liszt's mother took over the education of the children-against Marie's
wishes.
For the next 10 years Liszt continued to build his already towering
reputation and by the late 1840s he was unchallenged as the greatest virtuoso
of his day. It was his pre-eminence which ushered in the solo 'recital'
whereby a single artist would mostly perform for an entire programme. In
Liszt's case, the recital's music usually consisted of his own compositions.
These recitals were given throughout Europe, including satellites such
as Britain, Turkey and Russia. The money which these tours engendered forced
Liszt to take on a personal manager, thus freeing him to conduct his personal
life as he saw fit. This inevitably meant affairs-many of them notorious—with
leading female personalities of the day. In his travels he also met many
musicians and composers, from the Schumanns in Leipzig to Glinka in Moscow
and Wagner (then penniless and virtually unknown) in Weimar. The connection
with Weimar was to grow in significance; in 1842 he was given a largely
honorary conducting position by Grand Duke Carl Alexander (holding his
first concert in Weimar in 1844), and over the next few years he became
increasingly involved in the planning of the city's cultural development.
This would inevitably involve Liszt in Wagner's rise to fame.
The event which finally decided him to move to Weimar was his meeting
while on tour in Kiev with Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, an
immensely rich Polish aristocrat already separated from her German husband,
a member of the Tsar's military élite. Their decision to marry entailed
Carolyne, a devout Catholic, obtaining a divorce which required special
permission from the Tsar. The Princess's belief in the spiritual nature
of Liszt's artistic calling helped him decide to abandon his largely frustrating
(although very lucrative) concert career. By the spring of 1848 they were
settling into life in Weimar. This was harder for the Princess than for
Liszt; living openly with him, she was snubbed by Weimar society and her
estate in the Ukraine sequestered by the Russian state as part of the eventual
secular divorce settlement in 1852.
Despite these obstacles, the Princess's rented house in Weimar
became a major centre for artists, musicians and writers. During this settled
period Liszt began composing his first orchestral works, initiating the
series of tone poems which would remain one of his most distinctive compositional
legacies—Tasso and Les Preludes for example—and planning his Weimar musical
seasons. Looming large in his plans was a production of Wagner's Lohengrin.
(Wagner attended the rehearsals while on the run from the authorities in
Dresden for his part in the 1848-49 uprisings all over Europe.) Liszt personally
arranged for Wagner's flight to Switzerland. Wagner was not the only beneficiary
of Liszt's generosity in Weimar: in the years before his 1859 resignation,
Liszt mounted no fewer than 11 new productions of contemporary operas,
including three from Wagner, Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini, Meyerbeer's Les
Huguenots, Verdi's Ernani, Schumann's Genoveva and Schubert's neglected
Alfonso und Estrella.
Virtually everyone made the pilgrimage to Weimar, some remaining
close to Liszt (von Bülow marrying Cosima Liszt in 1857), others,
like Brahms, only fleetingly held in awe by the great man's talent. Even
good friends like the Schumanns found Liszt's compositions too much, as
Clara commented after a visit from the pianist in the early 1850s: "Oh!
What terrible composition! If a youngster were to write such stuff, one
might forgive him, but what can one say when a full-grown man is so deluded?".
The critic Eduard Hanslick called his challenging B-flat sonata 'a brazen
concatenation of utterly disparate elements...anybody who has heard this
thing and liked it is beyond hope'.
The 1860s brought a series of disasters, presaged by the death
in 1859 of Liszt's gifted only son, Daniel, from consumption; in 1861 the
Pope refused to spiritually sanction the Princess's legal annulment; in
1862 his beloved daughter, Blandine, died; in 1863 his second daughter,
Cosima, abandoned her husband Hans von Bülow, and eloped with none
other than Richard Wagner, to Liszt's chagrin. The breach between father
and daughter was never healed. Tired of the strife in Weimar; Liszt joined
the Princess who was already in Rome on a pilgrimage, and devoted himself
exclusively to religious music, even taking the four minor orders which
allowed him to assume the title of abbe'. The death in 1861 of the Princess's
husband had left the way clear for a new attempt to marry, but neither
had the will for it any more. After 1864 they were not to meet again.
By the end of the decade Liszt had written a series of devotional
works, including The Legend of Saint Elizabeth, and had permanently adopted
the wearing of a cassock. He was also invited back to Weimar to give a
series of master-class demonstrations; these were to continue for the rest
of his life, Liszt spending part of each year in Weimar. He also developed
his relationship with Budapest, nurturing his love for his homeland, and
in 1870 was appointed President of Budapest's music academy. He now divided
each year between Weimar, Budapest and Rome. In 1872 he came to a reconciliation
of sorts with Cosima and Richard Wagner; now married and well advanced
with their dream of building the Bayreuth theatre. Liszt's last great oratorio,
Christus, was premièred at Weimar in 1873, with Wagner and Cosima
present.
Liszt remained a focal point for the best young talents of the
day, and as his attachment to Rome receded, his involvement in their developing
careers increased. In 1876 his old lover, Countess Marie d'Agoult, died
in France, but he was left unmoved. Later that year, the Bayreuth première
of Wagner's Ring cycle gave him more to be moved by, as did the acclamation
he received at the 1878 Universal Exhibition in Paris, when his old enemy
Eduard Hanslick proposed that he should be made honorary president of the
Exhibition's musical jury.
Yet the pattern of his life—Weimar-Budapest-Rome, with the occasional
sortie to Bayreuth—did little to relieve his weariness. His rootlessness
and the gradual deterioration of his health led to the diminution of his
powers, while a series of piano works written in his last decade, most
of them filled with a deep melancholy, leaving the impression of a troubled
soul. In particular; four pieces written close to the time of Wagner's
death in 1883 have an existential angst which is deeply disturbing.
By his last years Liszt and the Princess had drifted apart entirely;
she refused to leave Rome and he was increasingly loath to go there. His
health was giving out and he tended to remain within reach of the Wagners,
and was deeply touched by Wagner's dedication of Parsifal to him. Yet with
Wagner's death, Cosima pushed him away. His chief pleasure now was teaching
the piano to his young pupils. With his eyesight considerably impaired
and his energy gone, he rarely played in public. By the summer of 1886
he was virtually blind, his body invaded by dropsy. He returned, ailing,
to Weimar where he had a devoted young companion, Lina Schmallhausen, to
comfort him. He died from pneumonia in July, and was buried in Bayreuth
during the festival.
Central to Liszt's achievement was his prodigious keyboard virtuosity,
his inventiveness and his ability to devise new ways of playing which revolutionized
the public's and other musicians' approach to the instrument. Thus it may
be held that his copious solo piano output is the most crucial part of
his legacy, including the B flat Sonata, his Années de Pèlerinage
and the études. But his orchestral tone poems—the so-called programme
music—are in a real sense his most permanent imaginative achievement. The
Dante and Faust symphonies are both major testaments to a concern with
literal and philosophical truths expressed in music, and as such are central
to the 19th-century Romantic tradition. They are also clear examples of
the sometimes demoniacal energies to be found in his music. Liszt has also
often been cited as important in these works in his coining and development
of the idea of theme transformation, rather than the more traditional ideas
of Classical development. This approach perhaps reached its apotheosis
in Wagner.
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