What Franz Liszt did in the concert hall was analogous to what Wagner did in the theater. It’s not surprising then that the two were colleagues and considerable influences on each other’s work (although there was a rupture between them for a while, after Wagner took up with Liszt’s married daughter).
Liszt was born in Raiding, Hungary. He began playing piano at age five and revealed a spectacular talent. He began composing at eight and made his public debut the next year. From there he went to Vienna and studied with Carl Czerny, who was a pupil of Beethoven’s and the author of books of keyboard finger exercises still in use. Then came Paris, more studies, and a sensational debut. But en route to this glorious career, Liszt faltered; there was a failed love, depression, religious yearnings, a years-long separation from the piano. Luckily, after 1830, he pulled himself together. Part of his resurrection came after hearing the demon fiddler Niccolò Paganini, who provided Liszt with a vision of supreme virtuosity. He made himself into a Paganini of the keyboard, the greatest pianist of his time and perhaps of all time. Even Brahms, who was not well treated by Liszt and who loathed his music, still said: “If you haven’t heard Liszt, you haven’t heard piano playing. There’s him, a long space, and then everybody else.”
Liszt’s way of building pieces out of single short motifs influenced Wagner’s invention of leitmotifs. As a keyboard innovator he along with Chopin redefined the instrument in ways still being explored a century later. He and Chopin were friends, the first extravagant and extroverted, the latter introverted as a person and restrained as a player. With their music, Liszt brought brilliance and color to the piano, Chopin subtlety and a quieter but no less original palette. The later history of piano music is unthinkable without both of them. Meanwhile with a series of arrangements for keyboard, Liszt helped spread the neglected orchestral music of Bach, Beethoven, Berlioz, and Schumann. He maintained his allegiance to Wagner and the Music of the Future while generously helping many young talents on the opposing side, including Grieg and Debussy.
Besides his supremacy as a virtuoso in an age that worshipped virtuosos, Liszt also happened to be devastatingly handsome. He invented the idea of the solo piano recital. Female fans would flock to his recitals to be transported in ways that resembled something between the screaming rock-star concerts of the twentieth century and a shark feeding frenzy. Liszt fed the frenzy with James Brown–like antics onstage: fake fainting fits, being carried offstage and staggering back, and so on. Like his friend Wagner, Liszt was a mad mixture of qualities, his mastery mixed inextricably with charlatanism. But he embodied what the age craved: the artist as hero, as showman, as semi-divine genius and superhuman virtuoso. He was a tireless womanizer, his conquests including famous women of the time, such as notorious dancer and actress Lola Montez. Mixed with his sexual profligacy was an abiding yen for religion, for purification and absolution.
In 1848 Liszt settled in Weimar with his longtime mistress, the cigar-puffing Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. She ghost-wrote much of his tracts and books, including one on Chopin. Amid a collection of students and devotees, Liszt wrote a great deal of music including symphonic poems, such as the Faust Symphony, after Goethe’s drama. In Weimar he produced perhaps his greatest work, the one-movement Piano Sonata in B Minor, and revised his wickedly difficult Transcendental Studies After Paganini for piano. His best-known music was and remains the visceral, deep-purple piano works, such as the four Mephisto Waltzes, exercises in the romantic-demonic. His Hungarian Dances are longtime popular favorites. Everywhere you look at Liszt as composer and man, you find ambiguity. His music can be strong, innovative, and splendiferous in color; at other times, flaccid, overwrought, and cloying. Brahms more or less forgave Wagner his personality and his bigotry, but he could not forgive Liszt his lapses in taste.
In later life, by now fat and warty, he took minor religious orders and called himself Abbé Liszt. During that period came eight years in Rome, attempts at holiness, a break with the princess, a return to Weimar, a reconciliation with Wagner, and a more experimental approach to music that was to have a great influence on later composers including Debussy and Bartók. There is a short Bagatelle Without Tonality from 1885 that is truly startling, on the way to Scriabin, reminding you that the modernist Schoenberg and his school were about to emerge. Much the same can be said about the atmospheric and hypnotic Nuages gris (Gray Clouds). Liszt died in July 1886 in the most appropriate way: in Bayreuth, where he had gone to take in Wagner’s Ring.
More Liszt: The complete Années de pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage); oratorio Christus.