Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, pianist, organist, conductor and writer on music, one of the leading representatives of late Romanticism in music. He studied piano with Carl Czerny and composition with Antonio Salieri and Antonín Reicha. He lived in Paris during the years 1823–35, in Switzerland and Italy in 1835–39, then in Weimar in 1848–61. From 1861 onwards he lived alternately in Rome, Pest (Budapest) and Weimar. He was ordained as an abbot in 1865.
He toured throughout all the European countries as a pianist, visiting Russia several times, including a trip to Moscow in 1843. He created a new style of piano performance, endowing the instrument with orchestral energy and color palette, enriched the piano repertoire, enhanced the comprehensibility of piano performance for wide audiences, bringing it out of salons into mass auditoriums and large concert halls. He was the head of the so-called Weimar School.
In his compositions, many of which are based on literary subject matter, he aspired to reveal the inner connection of music with poetry. He wrote oratorios (including “The Legend of St. Elizabeth,” composed in 1862, and “Christus,” composed in 1874), numerous works for the Catholic Church (Chorale Mass, 1865; Hungarian Coronation Mass, 1867; Requiem, 1868; the hymn “Ave Maris Stella,” 1865–68; choral works with organ), the Symphony to Dante’s “Divine Comedy” (1856), the “Faust Symphony,” based on Goethe (1857), 13 one-movement symphonic poems (he created this genre), two concertos (1856, 1861) and “Totentanz” (1859) for piano and orchestra, as well as numerous songs. He composed an enormous amount of piano compositions: the Fantasy-Sonata “After Reading Dante” (1839, was included in the “Années de Pèlerinage” cycle, 1835–77), Sonata in B minor (1853), 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies, the Spanish Rhapsody (1863), etudes (including the Grandes etudes d’après Paganini and the Transcendental Etudes), waltzes (including three “Mephisto-Waltzes” and four “Valses oubliés”), variations, numerous transcriptions (including those of J.S. Bach’s Prelude and Fugue for Organ, Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonies and fragments of popular operas, including “Chernomor’s March” from Mikhail Glinka’s opera “Ruslan and Ludmila”), etc. He wrote a considerable number of works for organ, including the Fantasy and Fugue on the theme of the chorale “Ad Nos, Ad Salutarem Undam” from Meyerbeer’s opera “Il Profeta” (1850) and the Fantasy and Fugue on the theme B–A–C–H (1870). He also wrote a large number of essays and larger works about music and musicians (including his book “Chopin”).
