![]() He was also one of the first pianists to perform without an orchestra: The melody of his piano works is characterized by a vocal line. Thus, he achieved differentiated possibilities of tonal expression for the piano (following partly the example of the effects achieved by Paganini on the violin). Liszt was the creator of a new kind of piano music which for the first time went far beyond the technique applied in the study works by Czerny and Friedrich Kalkbrenner, using the whole keyboard and playing with chords and octaves (in different registers), ornaments, leaps, parallel chords or octaves and wide arpeggios. In 1875 he became the first president of the newly founded Hungarian Academy of Music in Budapest. After some intrigue about the performance of the ✻arber of Baghdad« (1858) by Cornelius he resigned from his post as director of the opera in Weimar and went to Rome where he took minor orders, becoming the Abbé Liszt, when his plans to marry the Princess did not come to fruition. In Weimar, Liszt was the centre of a circle of students (Peter Cornelius, Joseph Raff, Hans von Bülow, Carl Tausig) whose ideas on music and style found expression in the New German School and became known to a wide public through the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein and the magazine »Neue Zeitschrift für Musik«. In Kiev he met Princess Carolyn Sayn-Wittgenstein (*1819, 1887) who followed him to Weimar where he had been appointed court music director in 1842 and advocated especially performances of contemporary works (Schumann, Berlioz, Wagner). From 1835 he lived with Comtesse Marie Cathérine Sophie d'Agoult (*1805, 1876 known as a writer under the pseudonym of Daniel Stern) in Geneva and Italy best known among their three children is Cosima for being the wife of Richard Wagner from 1870.Įxtended concert tours took Liszt to Vienna, Hungary, Berlin and Russia, among other places. In addition, he received literary impressions from writers such as Victor Hugo and Alphonse de Lamartine which he processed in his later compositions. In Paris he met the composers Gioacchino Rossini, Fryderyk Chopin, Hector Berlioz, Vincenzo Bellini, Giacomo Meyerbeer, and Niccolò Paganini, among others, of whose works he wrote individual arrangements which marked the transition to an extremely virtuoso piano style. Liszt studied in Vienna with Carl Czerny (piano) and Antonio Salieri (music theory), later in Paris with Ferdinando Paer (harmony) and Anton Reicha (composition), and undertook concert tours in France and to London. Legend has it that Beethoven kissed Liszt on the brow after the young boy played him his Archduke Piano Trio from memory with the missing violin and cello parts incorporated as he went along.Franz Liszt, Hungarian composer and pianist, one of the most famous piano virtuosos of his time and protagonist of the New German School. July 1886 he died from dropsy complicated by pneumonia. The rest of his life was dominated by a series of inspired sacred compositions, while his piano music became more calmly reflective and meditative in tone.Īctive to the end, even in 1886 (the year of his death) Liszt was on a tour which embraced his first visit to London in more than 40 years. Such was his devotion to the church that Pope Pius IX conferred on him the title of ‘Abbé’ four years later. In 1848, Liszt accepted a full-time professional post in Weimar where he increasingly turned his attention towards composing. ![]() He started every performance by ceremoniously removing a pair of white gloves and he invariably employed a second piano on stage so that onlookers could admire his prowess from every conceivable angle. ![]() Some particularly horrific scenes during the Paris cholera epidemic of 1832 so moved him that he once spent all night thrashing out the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) chant on the piano.īetween 18 Liszt gave well over a thousand concerts throughout most of western Europe, Turkey, Poland and Russia, stunning audiences wherever he went with his blend of pianistic devilry and showbiz razzmatazz. Liszt developed a morbid obsession with death in the 1830s. Liszt’s early progress was so astounding that by the age of nine he had already mastered Ferdinand Ries’s excruciatingly difficult E flat major Piano Concerto. Liszt’s output for solo piano was prodigious, centered on a core of more than 100 original titles, many of which subdivide into sets of half-a-dozen pieces or more. His compositions inspired a whole generation of keyboard virtuosi. Franz Liszt (1811–1886) was one of the most important composers of the Romantic period. ![]()
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