![]() Clara Schumann stated that "Liszt played at sight what we toil over and at the end get nowhere with."īoth Paganini and Liszt combined the highest caliber of virtuosity and musicianship with a conscious and charismatic talent for holding their largely middle class audiences enthrall. The greatest pianists of the time, including Chopin and Mendelssohn, while repelled by some of the vulgar showmanship of Liszt's playing, were none the less awed by probably the greatest technical pianist the world has known. Liszt stated clearly that he wanted to do for the piano what Paganini had done for the violin, and Liszt went so far as to transcribe a number of the solo violin caprices into highly effective and virtuosic piano music- the Paganini Etudes. ![]() It was Paganini's violin playing that inspired Liszt to the greatest heights of virtuosity and showmanship. ![]() Liszt was at the center of what became the definitive split between this path and the more conservative and ultimately less influential romantic tradition embodied in the music of Mendelssohn, Schumann and Brahms. In fact one can think of Berlioz as the beginning of that stream of Romanticism that goes through Liszt to Wagner and beyond into the music of Mahler and Richard Strauss. This was musical thought that was often inspired by literature and that contained programmatic implications. These two composers along with Paganini, who he heard with amazement in 1831, were the primary influences in forming Lizst's complex aesthetic character.īerlioz inspired thinking in the largest, grandest, and most colorful terms. Here he lived from 1823 to 1835, becoming friends with leading literary figures and painters as well as with Berlioz and Chopin. By fourteen, he had written Don Sanche, an operetta that was produced in Paris. After studies with Czerny and Salieri in Vienna in 1821, Liszt quickly made a name as a piano virtuoso, performing in London and Paris. Although Liszt was born along with the first generation of romantic composers (Berlioz, Chopin, Schumann and Mendelssohn), he outlived them all to become a friend of Wagner and proponent of the "music of the future."įranz Liszt was born in Hungary to a father who worked for the Esterhazy family, and who soon recognized his son's prodigious gifts. As pianist, composer and personality, Franz Liszt (b.1811) strides across the whole of the nineteenth century and is seminal in his influence on the twentieth.
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