Chopin may have been the one who liberated piano technique, but it was Liszt who spread the results through Europe. When Mocheles (link with Pianist in transition pt.2), heard the seventeenth year old Liszt, he was overcome ‘As to his playing, it surpasses in power and mastery of difficulties, everything I have ever heard’.Ĭlara Wieck was overwhelmed when she first heard him in 1838 and sobbed aloud ‘I have never found any artist except Paganini elevating and leading the public.’ Von Lenz summed that when Liszt appeared all other pianists disappeared. A refined, elegant pianist, he was never a virtuoso, nor did he ever try to be. His entrance on the stage would make the ladies’ head turn. In his youth, Liszt was slim, blond, aristocratic, volatile and was breathtakingly handsome and physically made of iron. He put together what was equivalent to Paganini’s violin virtuoso on the piano and modified the virtuosity in the colour and poetry that Chopin had to introduce. From Paganini, Liszt learned transcendental bravura and from Chopin he learnt poetry, style and finesse. Liszt learned that the piano can be a means of delicate expression as well as a bravura instrument. The other great influence for Liszt was Chopin, whom he heard of in 1832. Liszt consciously worked to outdo Paganini to create the piano equivalent effect Paganini had created on his violin. For the first time he saw a consummate showman in action (one of the supreme virtuosos in history), and from that moment on Paganini turned to be the decisive influence in his life. Liszt was swept off his feet after he attended Paganini’s Paris debut at the Opéra on March 9, 1831. One musician that Liszt would model was Paganini, a virtuoso violinist. I tried to make him improvise them to equip him with improvising skills’. I made him learn each piece very rapidly and he became an avid reader and was able to sight read compositions with considerable difficulty in public as though he had been studying them for a long time. It seems imperative to use the first months to regulate and strengthen his mechanical dexterity to avoid sliding into bad habits. His mental gift is ahead of his physical strength but he lacks solid technique. Nevertheless, I was amazed by the talent with which nature had equipped him. His playing was irregular and careless, and he had so little knowledge of correct fingering that he would be disorientated on the keyboard. ‘He was a pale, delicate looking child and while playing swayed in the chairs as if drunk, that I often thought he would fall to the floor. Liszt’s flamboyance was part of his personality and he had amazing talent to start with but who had not been properly trained until he met Carl Czerny, a fine pedagogue who had Liszt in 1819 and gave an account of the young Liszt: Seldom would one of those pianos end up without broken strings and hammers. He often had three pianos on the stage, using them as he fancied. In his concerto appearance, he would during the tuttis, talk gesticulate, beat time, stamp the floor, wiggle around so that he medals and decorations he loved to wear would clink and clank. After a few bars of prelude, he took the theme from Wagner’s KaisermarschI and by degrees worked himself up into a storm of rain-like run, hail-like trills, lightning arpeggios and thunderous chords, until at last his hair fell over his forehead, and as he tossed it back the figure at the piano recalled the well-known inspired look of the pictures of our youth’. After having remained standing long enough to allow all the opera glasses a sufficient survey of his fine head, Liszt began an extemporizing fantasia. ‘ Precisely at eleven o’clock a silver head of hair and well-known countenance above a cassock-girt figure moved majestically down the room and received a Caesar-like condescension the applause of the surrounding crowd. It was reported by the Musical Record in London: In 1875, before his death, he gave a concert in Leipzig. He was a proud man, and he did not allow anyone to forget that he was Franz Liszt. Liszt was paid to have his ladies faint and fight but with his reputation, he had ladies who swooned over him all his life. Heine gave an account of a concert he attended at which two Hungarian countesses, contending for Liszt’s snuffbox, threw each other on the ground and fought until they were exhausted. Other ladies came away with priceless broken strings from the piano he had played. They rushed madly to the stage to fish out the stub of cigar that Liszt smoked and the ladies who recovered them carried them in their bosom to the day she died. When Liszt (1811 – 1866) played the piano, ladies flung their jewels on stage instead of bouquets.
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