At the age of fourteen, he went with his father to Paris, and adopted French to such an extent that it remained his mother tongue for the rest of his life. In 1822 he met Beethoven, who bestowed a blessing he counted the most important formative experience of his musical life. His talent manifested itself very early, and his brief formal education culminated in studies in Vienna, principally with Czerny and Reicha.
#Superscribe music notation series#
The limits for space preclude the reissue of all of the programme notes written for the Hyperion Liszt series (these may be found elsewhere on this website), but I should like to offer a general introduction to the man and his music, and then offer some observations about the undertaking of this project.įerenc (Franz) Liszt (22 October 1811 – 31 July 1886)-Hungarian composer, conductor, pianist and teacher-was born in Raiding (now in Austria), the son of Adam Liszt, a minor official on the Esterházy estate, and his wife Anna, née Lager. It is a pleasure to note that, finally, the variety of his works in the current repertoire is slowly but surely expanding to show his great range as an artist-a confirmation, if any were required, that the general level of his output is remarkably high. Of course, over a composing life of more than sixty years, not every work is a masterpiece, but even the least of his works cannot help but show something of his pioneering spirit and originality. It is time that judgments made with this degree of crass ignorance were buried once and for all. And to add insult to injury, he was accused of posturing for taking his religion seriously (something which he had done in constancy from a boy) and the many facets of his complex character were dismissed as the masks of an actor. This is tosh, of course, and yet aspects of this accusation still linger if Liszt is played cheaply, one can still hear him accused of composing cheaply.
Many musicians were jealous of his success, and took Hanslick’s line that his compositions came as a kind of afterthought to engender intellectual respectability. He did own pianos, an excellent library, both musical and literary, and he enjoyed the freedom of every court in Europe.
He never owned property, nor even a coach and horses. He lost track of most of it, and gave away virtually all of it. He was never penurious the starving artist in the garret was someone whom he helped, but someone he never was. The trouble started whilst he was alive, of course, when many people simply couldn’t cope with his fame and popularity.
Liszt is the only great composer of the nineteenth century who still suffers from detractors, and this despite the acknowledged debt of almost every composer who was his younger contemporary or successor.
0 kommentar(er)
