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Liszt: Composers
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In later years, Liszt himself always took a sceptical point of view regarding his career as child prodigy. While he had earned much money and gained a prominent name, his general education had had no chance of development.[37] Since the early 1830s, he started reading huge amounts of books. When in 1886 he died, he left behind many thousands of books. His notes to the margin show that he did not only own those books but read them. Regarding his former oeuvre as child prodigy, he wrote to Lina Ramann in March 1880, it had become nothing of it because nothing had been to it. For young as well as for old composers it was always the best when the manuscripts were lost.[38]
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As a composer, Liszt is often looked down upon merely as a creator of bombast and noise. But what of the ground-breaking Etudes? the sublime Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude? the evocative range and vision of the three books of Années de pèlerinage? the sonorous mastery of the Hungarian Rhapsodies? the grandiosity of the B Minor Sonata?
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To further solidify the point...Beethoven was the end of a long historical tradition of music developing in a straight line, after Liszt the music world splintered into many schools and directions. Liszt influenced not some but all of these various schools that emerged. No other composer in history can stake this claim. He was like a prism - the single source of light that fractured into multiple rays of diverse and colorful influence. From the Late Romantics such as Rachmaninoff, Busoni and Mahler to the Impressionists Debussy and Ravel onto the Atonal Schoenberg. These latter schools becoming prevalent only in the next century, well after Liszt's death.
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