The two concertos for piano and orchestra by Franz Liszt belong to the standard concerto repertoire. A serious challenge for every pianist, they have been audience favourites for well over one hundred years. As a critic wrote, “these concertos are

Women loved Franz Liszt, and Franz Liszt loved women. The pianist and composer is almost as famous for his love life and his effect on women as his music-making. Today we’re looking at ten of the most intense love affairs

It is the fall of 1871. A twenty-six-year-old Ukrainian woman sends a cable to Europe to pianist and composer Franz Liszt. She warns him that she is about to cross the ocean to kill him. Ten days later, she shows

Franz Liszt first sought medical care in 1881, suffering from the early cardio-respiratory disease that would eventually take his life. Concurrently, Liszt also noted a gradual decline in the vision of his left eye. He had used corrective lenses for

The Fantasia / Fantasy as a genre in the 19th century (versus the 17th-century English fantasias, which were very different) gave the composer enormous range to use his imagination on whatever he had decided to fantasize about. In Liszt’s case,

Hungarian pianist Géza Anda (1921–1976) did his first studies with Ernst von Dohnányi and Zoltán Kodály at the Franz Liszt Academy in Budapest. In 1940, Anda won the Liszt Prize and then made his debut with the Budapest Philharmonic and

Franz Liszt (1811–1886) created the genre of the symphonic poem, but they weren’t without controversy. Eduard Hanslick, the premiere critic of mid–mid-19th-century Vienna thought little of them, noting that the addition of the extra-musical programmes did not justify what he

As soon as Richard Wagner had put the finishing touches on Lohengrin on 28 April 1848, he got embroiled in the revolutionary stirrings of the 1848 Revolutions. In Dresden, barricades were erected and the king presented with demands for democratic