![]() It was the most striking of the personal reinventions that ensured him a prime place in the gossip columns.ĭuring his concert tours he sometimes turned up in Hungarian national costume, including a ceremonial saber of honor, awarded to him by his compatriots in 1840. From then until his death in 1886 he sported a tonsure and an abbé’s robes: signs of sanctity to some and hypocrisy to others. He even took minor orders in the Roman Catholic Church in 1865, becoming an abbé but appropriately stopping short of the vow of chastity. Yet both interests seemed, as ever with Liszt, to be equally sincere. Liszt, Nietzsche acidly remarked, represented “School of Velocity” toward women. ![]() Liszt’s father died unexpectedly in 1827, less than two years after the opera’s premiere, leaving behind a gifted but unfocused son who was now throwing himself into French Romantic culture with a vengeance and already showing signs of a strong, if not entirely consistent, devotion to religion and the pleasures of the flesh. But “Don Sanche” proved to be no “Don Giovanni.” The next steps in the paternal master plan included the composition of “Don Sanche,” an opera that was supposed to set the seal on the boy’s Mozartean image. He studied with Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny (many readers may, like Liszt, have practiced exercises from his “School of Velocity”) for scarcely more than a year before being shuffled off to make his name in Paris. Yet like many prodigies Liszt became not just the focus of his family’s attention but also its breadwinner. And for all his worldly success, Liszt didn’t have a particularly easy ride. “Half Gypsy, half Franciscan monk,” he called himself another contemporary called him “Mephistopheles disguised as a priest.” But if his life was to some extent a touring soap opera played out publicly on various European stages, what the more prudish Mendelssohn described as a “constant oscillation between scandal and apotheosis,” it was at least a drama with a sympathetic protagonist. Liszt, like his music, was constructed of paradoxes, as he well knew. But although he is surely significant enough to celebrate, the question whether his music is actually any good has never really gone away. He was, to be sure, an unrivaled performer (“A god for pianists” in Berlioz’s words), a man of unusually catholic artistic interests and the 19th century’s nearest approach to a Hollywood superstar. His bicentenary follows hard on the heels of Chopin’s, last year, and anticipates Wagner’s and Verdi’s, in 2013.īut whereas no one really doubts the greatness of Wagner or Verdi, and Chopin seems universally beloved, things are not so straightforward with Liszt. 22, 1811, Franz Liszt was born in the Hungarian (now Austrian) village of Raiding.
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