Franz Liszt — Famous Quotes

Franz Liszt (1811–1886) was one of the most extraordinary personalities in the history of music: a pianist of legendary virtuosity, composer, conductor, teacher, and a decisive figure of Romanticism. Born in Raiding on 22 October 1811, he was a child prodigy and received instruction from, among others, Carl Czerny and Antonio Salieri. During the 1830s and 1840s, he achieved a level of European fame virtually unprecedented for an instrumentalist, transforming the piano recital into an artistic event of enormous public impact.

But to reduce Liszt to the spectacular virtuoso would be to ignore an essential part of his personality. After largely abandoning his itinerant career in 1847, he settled in Weimar, where he championed the music of Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, and other contemporary composers, conducted numerous works, and developed the symphonic poem as one of the great genres of the new music. Works such as the Piano Sonata in B Minor, the Transcendental Etudes, the Years of Pilgrimage, the Hungarian Rhapsodies, the two piano concertos, and the Faust and Dante symphonies show the extent to which his work transcended pure virtuosity.

In his maturity, spirituality acquired increasing importance. He spent long periods in Rome and received minor orders in the Catholic Church in 1865, thereafter becoming known as Abbé Liszt. His final years were spent mainly between Rome, Weimar and Budapest, while he continued to teach numerous young pianists without charging them. His correspondence is exceptionally extensive: approximately 6,000 letters are estimated to have been published, while a similar number remain unpublished; the Library of Congress preserves hundreds of manuscript documents that allow us to know his ideas about music, religion, literature, composition, and other artists directly.

In the final period of his life, Liszt’s music became increasingly austere, dark, and experimental. Works such as Nuages gris, Unstern!, La lugubre gondola, and the Bagatelle sans tonalité anticipate harmonic procedures that would only be fully developed by composers of later generations. He died in Bayreuth on 31 July 1886, at the age of 74.

The following quotations have been selected giving priority to those that can be connected with letters, Liszt’s own writings, or documented biographical testimony, deliberately avoiding many popular Internet quotations whose attribution is difficult to establish. The Library of Congress considers Liszt’s correspondence one of the fundamental sources for directly studying his thought.

1. THE PIANO AS PART OF HIMSELF

My piano is to me what his vessel is to the mariner, what his steed is to the Arab.

Source: This comes from Liszt’s writings on the piano and continues by describing the instrument as the intimate repository of everything that had stirred his imagination during the passionate years of his youth. It is one of his most revealing formulations concerning the identification between performer and instrument.

2. ALL MY DREAMS

There reposed all my desires, all my dreams, all my joys and all my sorrows.

Source: Continuation of the preceding reflection on his piano and on the intimate relationship Liszt established between the instrument, memory, and his own emotional life.

3. MUSIC NEVER STANDS STILL

Music never stands still; successive forms and styles are only resting places, like tents that are pitched and struck again on the road toward the Ideal.

Source: A thought attributed to Liszt in collections of his musical writings. It summarizes extraordinarily well his progressive conception of the history of music.

4. THE COMPOSER’S AMBITION

My sole ambition as a composer is to hurl my javelin into the infinite space of the future.

Source: One of Liszt’s best-known declarations concerning his conception of the composer as someone who must project himself into the future. It is especially significant when considering the visionary character of his final compositions.

5. THE VIRTUOSO IS ALSO A CREATOR

The virtuoso, like the composer, is a creator.

Source: Liszt maintained that the performer should not merely reproduce a score mechanically: he had to make it “speak, weep, sing and sigh,” recreating it through his own artistic consciousness. This is a fundamental idea for understanding his modern conception of interpretation.

6. MAKING MUSIC SPEAK

The performer is called upon to make the works speak, weep, sing and sigh.

Source: A condensed form of the same reflection by Liszt on the creative role of the virtuoso. For him, musical interpretation had to transform written signs into a living emotional experience.

7. MUSIC AND FEELING

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

Source: An aesthetic reflection attributed to Liszt on music’s specifically musical capacity to express emotional life directly.

8. FAITH AND CREATION

I did not compose my work as one puts on an ecclesiastical vestment... but it sprang from the truly fervent faith of my heart.

Source: Liszt’s declaration concerning the genuinely religious character of one of his compositions. It is important because it contradicts the interpretation of his religious devotion as merely an aesthetic pose.

9. SORROW TRANSFORMED INTO SOUND

I carry a deep sorrow in my heart which must now and then break out in sound.

Source: Testimony transmitted by Lina Ramann, one of Liszt’s earliest biographers. The phrase is particularly significant for understanding the sombre and radical works of his old age. It is also reproduced by the Library of Congress in its biographical study of the composer.

10. THE RESPONSIBILITY OF GENIUS

Genie oblige! — Genius has its obligations.

Source: An expression Liszt used on more than one occasion and one that summarizes an essential part of his artistic ethics: exceptional talent implied, for him, a responsibility toward art and toward others. The biographer Alan Walker cites it when examining Liszt’s personality and spirituality.

11. STUDY AS A PASSION

Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart and Weber surround me. I study them. I devour them with fury.

Source: A declaration by the young Liszt illustrating the extraordinary breadth of his intellectual interests. He did not conceive of himself simply as a pianist: literature, philosophy, religion, and music formed part of the same artistic education.

12. FIDELITY TO AN IDEAL

It is wise and fitting that I should strive with earnest constancy to attain my high objective, without heeding adverse circumstances or narrow-minded persons.

Source: Letter from Liszt to Professor L. A. Zellner, dated Pest, 6 April 1858, while discussing Faust and Dante. The letter is included in Liszt’s published correspondence.

13. GRATITUDE TOWARD HIS TEACHER

I have forgotten that good master to whom I owe both my talent and my success.

Source: Letter from Liszt to his former teacher Carl Czerny. Liszt affectionately reproaches himself for having taken too long to write to him and explicitly acknowledges the artistic debt he owed him.

14. FRIENDSHIP FOR LIFE

Always yours, for life, in heart and soul.

Source: The closing words of another letter from Liszt to Carl Czerny, dated 14 January 1835. Although brief, they reveal an aspect that appears constantly in his correspondence: the intensity with which he expressed friendship, gratitude, and personal loyalty.

15. THE ARTIST AND THE FUTURE

Faust and Dante can quietly wait until their due understanding comes.

Source: Letter to L. A. Zellner, 6 April 1858. Liszt was referring to his Faust and Dante symphonies and displaying extraordinary confidence that works not always understood by his contemporaries would eventually find their audience in the future.

LISZT IN HIS OWN WORDS

These quotations reveal a Liszt quite different from the stereotype of the extravagant virtuoso surrounded by admirers. In his correspondence we encounter a deeply intellectual, religious, and emotional man, extraordinarily generous toward other musicians and, above all, obsessed with the future of art. The Library of Congress preserves more than 370 manuscript letters by Liszt, many of them digitized, while the major editions of his correspondence constitute an indispensable primary source for separating his authentic words from the countless quotations subsequently attributed to him on the Internet.

For a historically rigorous publication, the most solid sources are Liszt’s own letters, editions of his correspondence, and early testimonies from people who knew him. The two volumes of Letters of Franz Liszt, compiled by La Mara and translated by Constance Bache, also make it possible to consult hundreds of these letters directly.