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Liszt: Works
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The number of existing works (books) about Liszt is about 11,000 ! The firsts biographies were published when Liszt was still alive. However, a lot of what has been published in the decades after Liszt's death is of various interest, as far as biographical objectivity is concerned. Among all existing books, one outbeats all of them: the recently published biography by Alan Walker. Alan Walker is a musicologist of historical importance. His trilogy of Liszt (published by Alfred A. Knopf) is the most complete study ever realized about Liszt, which took him moer than 20 years to accomlish.
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Liszt was one of the 19th century's harmonic innovators, especially in his use of complex, chromatic chords. He was an innovator ... with respect to form, especially in his technique of thematic transformation, later known as LEITMOTIV (q.v.). This technique and his chromatic harmony strongly influenced Wagner and Richard Strauss. His compositions for the piano inaugurated a revolutionary, difficult playing technique that gave to the piano an unprecedented variety of textures and sonorities. Among his well-known works for the piano are the Sonata in B Minor (1853), the 12 Transcendental Etudes (1851), the 20 Hungarian Rhapsodies (1846–85; no. 20 unpublished), Six Paganini Etudes (1851), Concerto No. 1, in E-Flat (1849; revised 1853), Concerto No. 2, in A-Major (1848; revised 1856-61), and the character pieces making up the three-volume Years of Pilgrimage (1855, 1858, 1877). Some of these last, representing nature scenes, anticipate the impressionism of the French composer Claude Debussy.
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In 1834 Liszt emerged as a mature composer with the solo piano piece Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, based on a collection of poems by Lamartine, and the set of three Apparitions. The lyrical style of these works is in marked contrast to his youthful compositions, which reflected the style of his teacher Czerny. In the same year, through the poet and dramatist Alfred de Musset, he met the novelist George Sand and ... Marie de Flavigny, Countess d' Agoult, with whom he began an affair. In 1835 she left her husband and family to join Liszt in Switzerland; their first daughter, Blandine, was born in Geneva on December 18. Liszt and Madame d'Agoult lived together for four years, mainly in Switzerland and Italy, though Liszt made occasional visits to Paris. He also taught at the newly founded Geneva Conservatory and published a series of essays, "On the Position of Artists," in which he endeavoured to raise the status of the artist--who up to then had been regarded as a kind of superior servant--to that of a respected member of the community.
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In 1846 Liszt returned to Hungary, where he became interested in gypsy music and eventually incorporated some of their melodies in his Hungarian Rhapsodies. On a concert tour in Russia, he met the Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, who eventually left her husband to marry him. Unable to obtain a divorce in Russia, the princess moved with Liszt to the Villa Altenberg, a home they bought in Weimar in 1848. Here Liszt settled down to compose, teach, and conduct. He wrote the two piano concertos, the Todtentanz for piano and orchestra, and the symphonic poems Tasso, Les Préludes, Mazeppa, and Hunnenschlacht at Weimar; and he conducted the first performances of numerous works, including Wagner's Lohengrin (1850). Liszt's daughter Cosima married the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow in 1857; she later left him for Wagner, with whom she had three children before marrying him.
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In 1869 Liszt was invited to return to Weimar by the grand duke to give master classes in piano playing, and two years later he was asked to do the same in Budapest. From then until the end of his life he divided his time between Rome, Weimar, and Budapest. After a reconciliation with Wagner in 1872, Liszt regularly attended the Bayreuth festivals. He appeared occasionally as a pianist in charity concerts and continued to compose. His music began to lose some of its brilliant quality and became starker, more introverted, and more experimental in style. His later works anticipate the harmonic style of Claude Debussy, and one late work called Bagatelle Without Tonality anticipates Béla Bartók and even Arnold Schoenberg.
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Except for his study with Czerny, as a pianist Liszt was self-taught. Perhaps as a consequence, he was able to expand the traditional technique, devising a variety of new pianistic figurations and combining these with a highly advanced concept of tonality. Indeed, his later piano works bear an uncanny resemblance to the piano pieces of Béla Bartók. Liszt's writing for the piano is, like Chopin's, exceedingly idiomatic, and he ranks among the most significant composers of works for the piano. Although his Hungarian Rhapsodies are best known to the lay public, in these pieces posterity is honoring him for his least remarkable achievement.
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