- by Art Sulit, www.MuSeeks.com/ArthurSulit
Music Timeline Author, August 10, 2005
The Hungarian Franz Liszt was the equivalent of a rock 'n roll superstar today. In his 20's, he concertized as a pianist across Europe, charming so many women in the process, and amassing tremendous wealth. He was able to use that wealth to help a great many of his fellow composers premiere their works, including Fredric Chopin and Richard Wagner.
As a practising Catholic since his youth, his was always a struggle between religious piety and the temptations of the stage. He fathered children with his live-in girlfriends, one of them married and openly contemptuous of her husband. The only surviving child of his turned out to be Cosima, who later married the conductor von Bulow, and then divorced him to shack up with Richard Wagner. (see Richard Burton in the film 'Wagner').
Because of his constant touring in the first half of his life, he never had time to attend to his children. Ever resentful of this, his daughter Cosima later wrote to him she shall never speak to him again. But still even then, the faith of his youth continued to call unto him, and he entered the religious orders as a secular priest in the latter years of his life. It was during that time that he composed his awesome Toccata in F for organ.
We are much indebted to Liszt for transcribing all nine of Beethoven's Symphonies to piano--forming perhaps the most difficult of all collections in the entire piano repertoire. I myself struggled for years to master a reduced version of the Symphony No. 5 in piano...but the main thing it taught me was the overall structure of Beethoven's Sympohnies, in easier-to-mark-up form.
Lizt's own compositions were noted for their technical virtuosity, although not widely regarded as beautiful as Chopin's, they were quite extraordinary lessons in showmanship and wide-spread fingering, necessary to handle the works of Rachmaninov. The ever-jealous and vain Wagner, who couldn't play much piano himself, said of Liszt, "He plays like a monkey, but cannot compose a note to his own." Perhaps Wagner was only half-right, being a truly great composer-authority of his own, who owed his very career to the help of his benefactor Liszt. Well, the priestly life of Liszt is a topic which well deserves to be treated on film, as Wagner and us today could learn some lessons that are needed today.