music school of his own in Berlin. In 1898 he went to London as a professor in charge of
the masterclasses at the Guildhall School of music where he remained for nine years.
From 1908 to 1917 he was director of his own conservatory in Munich. After 1917 he
made several highly successful concert tours. He moved to the United States in 1924,
eventually settling in Hollywood, and died in New York in 1946. His compositions
include symphonic works, operas, an oratorio, a violin concerto, a piano concerto,
chamber music, songs and numerous piano pieces. Liebling made a Liszt disc and made
two Liszt rolls which are on CD. The rolls are of Hungarian Rhapsody no. 4 and the
Waltz from Faust.
LISZT
Innovations
Franz Liszt (1811-1886) is one of the four great romantic composers for piano, the others
being Chopin, Schumann and Brahms.
Liszt was the greatest pianist of all time and wrote many original works and arrangements
for the piano. He possessed the most pianistic mind in history and expanded and revealed
the full potential of the piano more than any other composer. His innovations in
keyboard technique have never been equalled. Liszt’s piano and other compositions
bewildered, inspired and influenced theis H
imaginations of his own era and set the stage for the late romantic, impressionistic and
atonal schools. His music made a deep psychological and emotional impact.
Liszt used the device of transformation of themes, where a motif is varied, developed and
transformed into different themes expressing contrasting emotions, most significantly in
his epoch-making Sonata in B minor, in other piano works and in his symphonic poems,
piano concertos and symphonies.
Anecdotes
Liszt used to accompany the pieces which his pupils performed wth a running
commentary, mostly witty, sometimes sarcastic.
On Brahms’s B flat major piano concerto: ‘This is one of Brahms’s very finest works.
He himself plays it somewhat carelessly – Bülow plays it particularly well. At one point
he would say, ‘Now he’s puttting on his great boots.’
When a female pupil played his ‘Jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este’ badly, he said to her: ‘My
dear young lady. That was not the fountains in the park at the Villa d’Este but the
plumbing in the smallest room in the Villa d’Este; I have no wish to hear that noise and
must ask you to do your dirty washing at home!’ (Washing one’s dirty linen in public’
was Liszt’s criticism for poor playing.)