Franz Liszt field of work composed musical work
Musical works
Liszt was a prolific composer. He is best known for his piano music, but he also wrote for orchestra and for other ensembles, almost always including keyboard. His piano works are often marked by their difficulty. Some of his works are programmatic, based on extra-musical inspirations such as poetry or art. Liszt is credited with the creation of the symphonic poem.Piano music
The largest and best-known portion of Liszt's music is his original piano work. During the Weimar period, he composed 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies, themselves revisions of his own Magyar Dalok/Rhapsódiák. His thoroughly revised masterwork, "Années de pèlerinage" ("Years of Pilgrimage"), includes arguably his most provocative and stirring pieces. This set of three suites ranges from the virtuosity of the Suisse Orage (Storm) to the subtle and imaginative visualizations of artworks by Michelangelo and Raphael in the second set. "Années de pèlerinage" contains some pieces which are loose transcriptions of Liszt's own earlier compositions; the first "year" recreates his early pieces of "Album d'un voyageur", while the second book includes a resetting of his own song transcriptions once separately published as "Tre sonetti di Petrarca" ("Three sonnets of Petrarch"). The relative obscurity of the vast majority of his works may be explained by the immense number of pieces he composed, and the level of technical difficulty which was present in much of his composition.
Liszt's piano works are usually divided into two categories: original works, and transcriptions, paraphrases, or fantasies on works by other composers. Examples of his own works are Harmonies poétiques et religieuses of May 1833 and the Piano Sonata in B minor (1853). Liszt's transcriptions of other composers include Schubert songs, fantasies on operatic melodies, and his piano arrangements of symphonies by Hector Berlioz and Ludwig van Beethoven. Liszt also made piano arrangements of his own instrumental and vocal works, such as the arrangement of the second movement "Gretchen" of his Faust Symphony, the first "Mephisto Waltz," the "Liebesträume No. 3," and the two volumes of his "Buch der Lieder."
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