Franz Liszt: Virtues and Defects

Franz Liszt (1811–1886) was one of the most extraordinary personalities of nineteenth-century music. His character was full of contrasts: dazzlingly vain yet remarkably generous, theatrical yet deeply religious, emotionally impulsive yet capable of immense loyalty, worldly yet increasingly ascetic in later life. Few great composers combined such brilliance with such contradictions.

HIS GREATEST VIRTUES

GENEROSITY

Perhaps Liszt’s most striking personal virtue was his extraordinary generosity. He frequently played concerts for charitable causes, supported musicians in financial difficulty, and often gave lessons without charging fees. In later life, many young pianists travelled to Weimar simply to play for him and receive advice.

His generosity was not merely financial. He gave something equally precious: his prestige. Liszt repeatedly used his own fame to promote composers whom the public did not yet understand.

He championed Berlioz, Wagner, Schumann, Saint-Saëns, Grieg, Borodin, Smetana and many others. In this respect, Liszt was almost unique among the great composer-performers of his generation.

LOYALTY TO OTHER COMPOSERS

Liszt had an exceptional ability to admire talent without feeling threatened by it.

He transcribed and performed the music of Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Wagner and others, helping to disseminate works that might otherwise have reached a much smaller audience.

His piano transcriptions of Beethoven’s symphonies were not merely virtuoso displays; they were also acts of cultural advocacy at a time when orchestral concerts were far less accessible than today.

His promotion of Wagner was especially important. Liszt conducted Wagner’s music, defended him publicly and helped him materially during periods of exile and financial difficulty.

INTELLECTUAL CURIOSITY

Liszt possessed a remarkably open musical mind.

He was fascinated by literature, religion, painting, philosophy and politics. His music reflects this curiosity: Dante, Petrarch, Goethe, Byron, Lamartine, Victor Hugo and religious texts all stimulated his imagination.

This intellectual openness also explains why his late music became so radical. Liszt continued experimenting when he was already an internationally revered figure. Instead of merely repeating the brilliant style that had made him famous, he explored unusual harmonies, ambiguous tonality, sparse textures and forms that anticipated later composers.

COURAGE AS AN INNOVATOR

Liszt was willing to take enormous artistic risks.

He helped create or redefine the symphonic poem, transformed the piano recital, expanded piano technique, developed cyclic thematic procedures and pursued harmonic experiments that pointed toward Wagner, Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin and even certain aspects of twentieth-century modernism.

His late works are especially revealing. Pieces such as Nuages gris, Unstern!, Bagatelle sans tonalité and La lugubre gondola show a composer willing to abandon conventional beauty almost completely.

That required considerable artistic courage.

CHARISMA

Liszt possessed extraordinary personal magnetism.

Contemporary descriptions repeatedly emphasise his presence, elegance, expressive face, commanding profile and ability to dominate a room. At the piano, this charisma became almost overwhelming.

The famous phenomenon later called “Lisztomania” was not simply the result of technical virtuosity. Audiences responded to the impression that Liszt was transforming the piano into an orchestral, theatrical and almost spiritual medium.

CAPACITY FOR FRIENDSHIP

Despite the mythology surrounding his romantic life, Liszt was capable of deep and enduring friendships.

He maintained important relationships with musicians, writers, aristocrats and pupils throughout Europe. His correspondence reveals considerable warmth, humour and concern for others.

He could also be remarkably patient with younger musicians.

SPIRITUAL SERIOUSNESS

Liszt’s religious life was complicated, but it should not be dismissed as theatrical.

Religion had attracted him since youth. In later life he received minor orders in the Catholic Church and became known as Abbé Liszt.

His religious compositions are uneven, but the spiritual impulse behind them was genuine. Works such as Via Crucis, Christus, Missa Choralis and The Legend of St. Elisabeth reveal an increasingly austere conception of music very far removed from the glittering virtuosity of his youth.

EXTRAORDINARY CAPACITY FOR WORK

Liszt’s productivity was immense.

He composed, performed, conducted, taught, wrote, arranged other composers’ works and travelled constantly across Europe.

Even after abandoning the life of the touring virtuoso, he maintained a demanding existence divided largely between Rome, Weimar and Budapest.

His capacity for sustained intellectual and artistic activity remained remarkable into old age.

HIS FLAWS AND CONTRADICTIONS

VANITY

Liszt was undeniably conscious of his appearance, fame and social power.

During his virtuoso years he cultivated an image with extraordinary effectiveness: the dramatic profile, flowing hair, theatrical gestures and carefully constructed public presence all became part of the Liszt phenomenon.

There was genuine artistry behind this image, but also vanity.

He understood celebrity exceptionally well and was one of the first musicians to exploit something resembling the modern cult of the star performer.

THEATRICALITY

Liszt could be excessively theatrical, both musically and personally.

Some contemporaries felt that his gestures at the piano were exaggerated. Even admirers sometimes complained that his need to astonish audiences occasionally overwhelmed musical proportion.

The same criticism can be applied to some of his compositions.

At his weakest, Liszt could substitute effect for substance: thunderous octaves, glittering passagework, dramatic pauses and rhetorical gestures could become ends in themselves.

At his best, however, exactly the same qualities created extraordinary music.

EMOTIONAL IMPULSIVENESS

Liszt often allowed emotion to govern important decisions.

His relationships with Marie d’Agoult and later Princess Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein were intensely passionate but complicated.

His personal life frequently involved dramatic changes of direction, emotional tensions and social difficulties.

Liszt was capable of profound affection, but emotional stability was not necessarily one of his strongest qualities.

INCONSISTENCY

Liszt was extraordinarily productive, but the quality of his enormous output is uneven.

Alongside masterpieces such as the B minor Sonata, the Transcendental Études, the Hungarian Rhapsodies at their best, the Années de pèlerinage, the Piano Concertos, the Faust Symphony and his late piano works, there are many compositions that feel conventional, inflated or hastily written.

Part of this unevenness resulted from his astonishing productivity.

Liszt sometimes seemed unable—or unwilling—to distinguish between inspired material and merely effective material.

ATTRACTION TO SPECTACLE

Liszt occasionally succumbed to the temptation of musical spectacle.

The virtuoso paraphrases and fantasies based on popular operas were often brilliantly crafted, but some were clearly designed to produce an immediate effect upon audiences.

This contributed to the nineteenth-century image of Liszt as a superficial showman.

That judgement is unfair when applied to his complete career, but it was not entirely invented.

A TENDENCY TOWARD GRANDIOSITY

Liszt often thought on an enormous scale.

Sometimes this produced masterpieces. At other times it resulted in music that could become overloaded with philosophical programmes, literary associations, religious symbolism or rhetorical ambition.

The symphonic poems and large religious works can occasionally seem burdened by their intellectual intentions.

Liszt sometimes wanted music to encompass philosophy, poetry, religion, history and drama simultaneously.

His ambition was magnificent—but not always matched by formal discipline.

COMPLICATED ROMANTIC BEHAVIOUR

Liszt’s emotional and romantic life could cause considerable suffering.

His long relationship with Marie d’Agoult produced three children, including Cosima, later the wife of Richard Wagner. Their relationship deteriorated bitterly.

His subsequent relationship with Princess Carolyne was equally complicated by legal, religious and social obstacles.

Liszt was not simply a heartless seducer—the popular caricature is exaggerated—but neither was his private life emotionally uncomplicated.

DIFFICULTY IMPOSING DISCIPLINE ON THOSE CLOSE TO HIM

Liszt could be remarkably indulgent.

This quality made him beloved by pupils, but it also sometimes prevented him from confronting people effectively.

His relationship with Wagner illustrates the problem particularly well. Liszt admired Wagner enormously and repeatedly supported him, even when Wagner’s behaviour could be demanding, manipulative or ungrateful.

Liszt’s generosity occasionally became excessive tolerance.

THE GREAT PARADOX OF LISZT

The fascinating thing about Liszt is that many of his virtues and defects were actually two sides of the same personality.

His vanity was inseparable from his charisma.

His theatricality was inseparable from his revolutionary understanding of performance.

His emotional instability was connected to extraordinary imaginative sensitivity.

His grandiosity produced both bombast and masterpieces.

His enormous generosity sometimes became excessive indulgence.

And his desire to astonish the public eventually evolved into something almost opposite: the austere, enigmatic and frequently disturbing music of his final years.

Liszt therefore cannot easily be reduced either to the flamboyant virtuoso of caricature or to the benevolent elderly Abbé surrounded by pupils in Weimar.

He was both.

Perhaps his greatest virtue was precisely this extraordinary capacity for transformation: from child prodigy to romantic idol, from touring virtuoso to conductor and musical reformer, from European celebrity to teacher, religious thinker and radical experimental composer.

Few figures in the history of classical music lived so many different artistic lives within a single lifetime.

FRANZ LISZT (1860-1870)