page_title: Franz Liszt
section_title: Performing style
hierarchical_section_title: Franz Liszt / Pianist / Performing style
context_page_description: Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, music teacher, arranger, and organist of the Romantic era. He is widely regarded to be one of the greatest pianists of all time. He was also a writer, philanthropist, Hungarian nationalist, and Franciscan tertiary.
  Liszt gained renown in Europe during the early nineteenth century for his prodigious virtuosic skill as a pianist. He was a friend, musical promoter and benefactor to many composers of his time, including Frédéric Chopin, Charles-Valentin Alkan, Richard Wagner, Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Camille Saint-Saëns, Edvard Grieg, Ole Bull, Joachim Raff, Mikhail Glinka, and Alexander Borodin.
  A prolific composer, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the New German School. He left behind an extensive and diverse body of work which influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated 20th-century ideas and trends. Among Liszt's musical contributions were the symphonic poem, developing thematic transformation as part of his experiments in musical form, and radical innovations in harmony.
context_section_description: There are few, if any, good sources that give an impression of how Liszt really sounded from the 1820s. Carl Czerny claimed Liszt was a natural who played according to feeling, and reviews of his concerts especially praise the brilliance, strength and precision in his playing. At least one also mentions his ability to keep absolute tempo, which may be caused by his father's insistence to practice with a metronome. His repertoire then consisted primarily of pieces in the style of the brilliant Viennese school, such as concertos by Hummel and works by his former teacher Czerny, and his concerts often included a chance for the boy to display his prowess in improvisation. Liszt possessed notable sight-reading skills.
  Following the death of Liszt's father in 1827 and his hiatus from the life as a touring virtuoso, Liszt's playing likely gradually developed a more personal style. One of the most detailed descriptions of his playing from that time comes from the winter of 1831–32, when he was earning a living primarily as a teacher in Paris. Among his pupils was Valerie Boissier, whose mother, Caroline, kept a careful diary of the lessons.:
  M. Liszt's playing contains abandonment, a liberated feeling, but even when it becomes impetuous and energetic in his fortissimo, it is still without harshness and dryness. [...] [He] draws from the piano tones that are purer, mellower and stronger than anyone has been able to do; his touch has an indescribable charm. [...] He is the enemy of affected, stilted, contorted expressions. Most of all, he wants truth in musical sentiment, and so he makes a psychological study of his emotions to convey them as they are. Thus, a strong expression is often followed by a sense of fatigue and dejection, a kind of coldness, because this is the way nature works.
  Liszt was sometimes mocked in the press for facial expression and gestures at the piano. Also noted were the extravagant liberties that he could take with the text of a score. Berlioz tells how Liszt would add cadenzas, tremolos and trills when he played the first movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata and created a dramatic scene by changing the tempo between Largo and Presto. In his Baccalaureus letter to George Sand from the beginning of 1837, Liszt admitted that he had done to gain applause and promised to follow both the letter and the spirit of a score from then on. It has been debated to what extent he realised his promise, however. By July 1840, the British newspaper The Times could still report:
  
  His performance commenced with Handel's Fugue in E minor, which was played by Liszt with an avoidance of everything approaching to meretricious ornament and indeed scarcely any additions, except a multitude of ingeniously contrived and appropriate harmonies, casting a glow of colour over the beauties of the composition and infusing into it a spirit which from no other hand it ever before received.
caption: Franz Liszt Fantasizing at the Piano (1840), by Danhauser, commissioned by Conrad Graf. The imagined gathering shows seated Alfred de Musset or Alexandre Dumas, George Sand, Franz Liszt, Marie d'Agoult; standing Hector Berlioz or Victor Hugo, Niccolò Paganini, Gioachino Rossini; a bust of Beethoven on the grand piano (a "Graf"), a portrait of Lord Byron on the wall, and a statue of Joan of Arc on the far left.[42][43][44]
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