Piano Music - Franz Liszt

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📖 "Whoever really wants to know what Liszt has done for the piano should study his old operatic Fantasies. They represent the classicism of piano technique.
Johannes Brahms, in Friedheim's Life and Liszt (1961)

📖 "I have not seen any musician in whom musical feeling ran, as in Liszt, into the very tips of the fingers and there streamed out immediately."
Felix Mendelssohn on Liszt

📖 "Anyone who cannot tell sentimentality from true feeling, or false pathos from the genuine kind, will ruin Liszt's music, even if he does not ruin his own reputation. Anyone who does not play Liszt with nobility passes sentence on himself."
Alfred brendel
In The Times (3 November 1986)

📖 "One no longer thinks of difficulty overcome; the piano vanishes and - music appears."
Heinrich Heine
In Beckett, Liszt (1956)

📖 "He is without doubt the artist who finds in Paris the most unreserved enthusiasm, as well as the keenest opposition. It is significant that no one speaks of him with indifference. A man who lacks positive stature, cannot in this world around favourable or antagonistic passions. It itakes fire to kindle men, whether to hate or to love.What speaks most for Liszt is the respect with which even his enemies recognize his personal merits. He is a man of unruly but noble character, unself-seeking and without falseness."
Heinrich Heine Letters on the French Stage
In Barzun Pleasures of Music (1952)

📖 "Liszt never charged a fee from any of his pupils, and we all looked upon him with a feeling akin to adoration. Felix Weingartner … once said to me 'Liszt was the decentest of them all.' The word decent seems a strange one to apply to this extraordinary personality, but the more I think of it, the more I realize it's the right epithet for Liszt. Indeed I go further than that. Liszt was the good Samaritan of his day and generation."
Frederic Lamond Memoirs (1949)

📖 "[Of Liszt:] The incontestable incarnation of the modern piano."
Camille Saint-Saëns Portraits et Souvenirs (1899)

📖 "[Of Liszt:] The world persisted to the end in calling him the greatest pianist in order to avoid the trouble of considering his claims as one of the most remarkable of composers."
Camille Saint-Saëns Harmonie et Mélodie (1885)

📖 "A young lady pianist had announced a recital, advertising herself (in the hope of attracting a larger audience) as a 'pupil of Liszt'. As she had never laid eyes on him in her life, she was horrified to read in the papers on the morning of her concert that the Abbé had arrived in the city. The only thing to be done was to make a clean breast of it; she went to his hotel and asked for an interview. When she was shown in she confessed with many tears, and asked for absolution. Liszt asked her the name of the pieces she was going to play, chose one and made her sit down at the piano and play it. Then he gave her some hints about her performance, and dismissed her with a pat on the cheek, and the remark, 'Now, my deear, you can call yourself a pupil of Liszt.'"
Charles Villiers Stanford Pages from an Unwritten Diary (1914)

Franz Liszt

1811 - 1886
Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, music teacher, arranger, and organist of the Romantic era.

In Liszt's Words

📖 "Le concert c'est moi."
Liszt on his innovation of the solo recital (1839)

📖 “For the virtuoso, musical works are in fact nothing but tragic and moving materializations of his emotions; he is called upon to make them speak, weep, sing and sigh, to recreate them in accordance with his own consciousness. In this way he, like the composer, is a creator, for he must have within himself those passions that he wishes to bring so intensely to life.”

📖 “Music embodies feeling without forcing it to contend and combine with thought, as it is forced in most arts and especially in the art of words.”

📖 “A person of any mental quality has ideas of his own. This is common sense.”

📖 "Real men are sadly lacking in this world, for when they are put to the test they prove worthless."

📖 "Supreme serenity still remains the Ideal of great Art. The shapes and transitory forms of life are but stages toward this Ideal, which Christ's religion illuminates with His divine light."

📖 "The principal task of a conductor is not to put himself in evidence but to disappear behind his functions as much as possible. We are pilots, not servants."

📖 “Beware of missing chances; otherwise it may be altogether too late some day.”

📖 “Music is the heart of life." She speaks love; "without it, there is no possible good and with it everything is beautiful.”

📖 "Everyone is against me. Catholics, because they find my church music profane, Protestants because to them my music is Catholic, Freemasons because they think my music too clerical; to conservatives I am a revolutionary, to the 'Futurists' an old Jacobin. As for the Italians … if they support Garibaldi they detest me as a hypocrite; if they are on the Vatican side, I am accused of bringing Venus's grotto into the Church. To Bayreuth I am not a composer but a publicity agent. Germans reject my music as French, the French as German, to the Austrians I write Gypsy music, to the Hungarians foreign music. And the Jews loathe me, my music and myself, for no reason at all."
In a Letter to Ödön Mihalovich from his last years, in New Hungarian Quarterly (autumn 1986)

📖 "Music is never stationary; successive forms and styles are only like so many resting places - like tents pitched and taken down again on the road to the Ideal."

📖 "Music does not lie to the feelings."

Quotes by Franz Liszt

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