Alright guys, new section open!!!!! Just to warm ourselves up a bit, let's start with... well, the biography of Maestro Liszt, if fate permits....
Like many musicians of his time, he showed remarkable musical abilities before the age of ten. Liszt is also remembered for his hands, which were larger than normal and were the envy of other musicians of that era. After starting his piano studies very early with his father Adam, a Hungarian official descended from German peasants in the service of Prince Esterházy, at eleven years old he moved with his family to Vienna, where he took composition lessons with Salieri and piano lessons with Czerny. In 1822, in Paris, he studied theory and composition with Paer, but was not admitted to the capital's Conservatory by Cherubini. However, it was thought that his talent as a young prodigy could be exploited by having him compose an opera, Don Sanche. But the opera, also due to the youth's inexperience, was not successful and, despite being very interesting, ended up forgotten. In 1825, when he was already known as a pianist, he played in London in the presence of King George IV. In 1826, he was on tour in France and Switzerland while continuing his studies with Reicha.
From 1828, he settled in Paris where he lived teaching music. In 1830, he attended the first performance of Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique; he met Felix Mendelssohn and Fryderyk Chopin. In 1833, he met Countess Marie d'Agoult; the following year, George Sand.
Between 1835 and 1839, Liszt undertook a long journey-escape with Marie d'Agoult, who abandoned her husband and two daughters. Initially, they arrived in Switzerland, which inspired the musician's Album d'un voyageur and the First Book of the Années de pèlerinage. In December 1835, their first daughter Blandine was born. Meanwhile, Liszt did not neglect his activity as a pianist (going on to build through trial and error the archetype of the modern recital) and returned to Paris to defend his reputation, especially towards Thalberg, with whom he engaged in a musical challenge organized by Princess Belgiojoso. It was now 1837 when Liszt and Marie d'Agoult arrived in Italy, where Cosima and Daniel would be born. They stayed particularly on Lake Como, in Venice and Milan (where a heavy controversy began with the Italian public, who were completely unacquainted with instrumental music), Florence, Rome, and San Rossore. The encounters and friendships that intertwined were many and fruitful (Rossini, Bartolini, Ingres, Sainte-Beuve). Many musical pages refer back to this experience, including the Second Book of the Années de pèlerinage. Many are also the writings Liszt published in relation to this journey and the musical condition of the era (especially the Lettres d'un Bachelier ès Musique). However, it is clear today that the articles, while expressing the musician's thoughts, were written by Marie d'Agoult.[2].
In 1840, he met two people who would prove fundamental for him and for the history of music: Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner. With the latter, the partnership, in the name of the project of a music for the future, was immediate and transformed Liszt the pianist, already an idol of the masses in a fully modern sense, into one of the most ardent supporters of Wagnerian total art. The correspondence that has remained to us constitutes a document of rare intensity and poetic depth.
Concerts around the world followed frenetically. In 1844, he broke off his relationship with Marie d'Agoult and, in 1847, met Princess Caroline Von Sayn-Wittgenstein in Kiev, with whom he moved to Poland. Settling in Weimar in 1848, he began composing the symphonic poem Les Préludes and the Symphony Berg.
During the Dresden revolt of 1849, Liszt helped the revolutionary Wagner escape to Switzerland. These were years of feverish creativity (despite the death of his thirteen-year-old son Daniel), among the many masterpieces he brought to life: the symphonic poem Mazeppa, the Sonata, the two concertos for piano and orchestra, Totentanz, and hundreds of piano pieces. In 1861, during a trip to Paris, he played for Napoleon III and met Georges Bizet. That same year in Rome, he could not marry Von Sayn-Wittgenstein because the latter was unable to obtain an annulment of her previous marriage. During this period, Liszt manifested a strong religious impulse.
In 1862, he composed the Cantico del sol di san Francesco d'Assisi; in the same year, his firstborn Blandine died. He decided to enter the monastery of Madonna del Rosario in Rome, certain that only faith could be true comfort. The relationship between his daughter Cosima and Wagner (in 1865 they had a daughter Isolde, followed by Eva in 1867, and Siegfried Wagner in 1869) undermined relations with the latter. In 1864, in memory of Blandine, he wrote La Notte.
In 1865, he received tonsure and minor orders in the Vatican. From then on, he is often referred to as"
Abbé Liszt, my obviously the title is merely honorary, given the personality of the man who wore that cassock, since minor orders do not in themselves grant the title of abbé. His compositional vein turned more and more towards sacred music: he composed the Missa Choralis and the Christus (1867). In the last period of his life, Franz Liszt worked incessantly as a composer and organizer of musical events in Weimar and Leipzig together with the Russian pianist Alexander Ilyich Siloti, the true heir to Lisztian pianism. In Germany, during the Bayreuth festival of 1886 (a festival created by Wagner), Liszt fell seriously ill with pneumonia and died on July 31 of the same year.
His catalogue includes numerous symphonic program works, three piano concertos and orchestra, a large number of pieces for piano as well as a repertoire of pieces for organ that will change the face of German organ music forever.
Various of his pieces have entered the classical music repertoire and are known by a vast audience, among them the very famous Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp Minor, Liebestraum No. 3, Mephisto Waltz, Ballade in B minor, Piano Concerto in E-flat Major and the Sonata in B minor.
-(thanks wikipedia for existing haha)