Franz Liszt Biography

Franz Joseph Liszt was a 19th century composer, piano prodigy, conductor, and philanthropist. Born in Hungary on October 22, 1811, Liszt became famous in during the early nineteenth century for his exceptional piano skills. His works influenced and anticipated 20th-century ideas and trends. His most significant contributions to the world of music were the invention of the symphonic poem, developing the concept of thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form, and making radical departures in harmony.

Liszt’s father was also musically driven—he played the piano, violin, cello and guitar, and even knew classic composers Haydn and Beethoven personally. Young Liszt began listening to his father play the piano when he was just six years old, and received lessons from him by age seven. Liszt began composing his own music by the time he was eight years old, and appeared in concerts at Sopron and Pressburg by the time he was nine. After these concerts, affluent sponsors offered to pay for Liszt’s musical education in Vienna.

Liszt made his public debut in Vienna on December 1, 1822, with a concert at the Landständischer Saal. He was introduced to several Austrian and Hungarian aristocratic circles, and he met Beethoven and Schubert. In 1823, Anton Diabelli commissioned Lizst to compose a variation on his waltz to feature it as Variation 24 in Part II his anthology, Vaterländischer Künstlerverein. Part II consisted of 50 variations by 50 different composers, and Liszt was the only child composer in the anthology.

In 1833, Liszt met the Countess Marie d’Agoult, and in 1835 she left her husband to join Liszt. For the next twelve years, he was at the height of his career. Honors were showered on him and he wrote his ‘Three Concert Études’. He would have concerts three or four times a week, so he probably had about a thousand public appearances during this period. In 1841, Franz Liszt was admitted to the Freemason’s lodge “Unity” and “Zur Einigkeit”, in Frankfurt am Main. In 1845 he became an honorary member of the lodge “Modestia cum Libertate” at Zurich and in 1870 of the lodge in Pest. After 1842, “Lisztomania” swept across the continent—crowds would go wild with Liszt, women fighting over his silk handkerchiefs and velvet