Franz Liszt - Hungarian Rhapsody no.2 (The Perfect Version) - YouTube Franz Liszt - Hungarian Rhapsody no.2 (The Perfect Version) Want to watch this again later? Sign in to add this video to a playlist. Need to report the video? Sign in to report inappropriate content. Rating is available when the video has been rented. This feature is not available right now. Please try again later. Uploaded on Dec 9, 2009 Here is the free listening/download link: Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Franz Liszt Songfacts Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 by Franz Liszt Songfacts Songfacts You whippersnappers may think celebrities are a phenomena of the modern age but Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt (1811-1886) was just as famous throughout Europe as Lady Gaga and her ilk are today. Liszt displayed incredible talent at a young age, easily sight-reading multiple staves at once. After moving to Vienna to study under Salieri (Mozart's supposed rival), Liszt made his first public performance at the age of 9.

It was such a success that Beethoven, who knew his father, rushed up on stage and kissed him. Liszt left Vienna in 1823 to travel. In Paris, he attended a concert by the virtuoso violinist Paganini and became motivated to become the greatest pianist of his time. He often took to seclusion in his room, and was heard practicing for over 10 hours a day. The flamboyant pianist would begin a concert by tossing his long blonde hair and throw his green gloves to the floor. He then would proceed with hair flopping over his eyes, thumping his piano to pieces. Women worshipped him, fought over him and collapsed in orgasmic swoons while he played - " Lisztomania " they called it. Despite being the most famous performer of his day, Liszt was not so known for his composing. However the Hungarian was pretty prolific, producing 400 original compositions and 900 transcriptions for piano in his lifetime. Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, is the second and by far the most famous in a set of 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies by the piano maestro.

Composed in 1847, the year he retired from the concert platform, the rhapsody was first published as a piano solo in 1851. Its immediate success and popularity on the concert stage soon led to an orchestrated version. In addition to the orchestral version, the composer arranged a piano duet version in 1874. By the end of the 19th century, the difficult technical challenges of the piano solo version led to the rhapsody's acceptance as the "unofficial standard" by which every notable pianist would prove himself, and it became an expected staple of virtually every performance of the greatest pianists of the era. Fans of mid 20th century cartoons will be familiar with this piece as it was constantly cropping up in animations during that period. The first such appearance was as part of a piano solo by Mickey Mouse in 1929's The Opry House and it's best known use is arguably in Friz Freleng's Rhapsody in Rivets where the construction of a skyscraper is synchronized to the rhapsody.

Many of you will also recognise the work from Daffy Duck And Donald Duck's dueling pianos at the Ink And Paint Club in the 1988 movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit?. The rhapsody pops up several times in Marx Brothers films. In A Day at the Races, Chico plays it as an introduction to his main number on the piano with an orchestral accompaniment with Harpo conducting comically. Chico also plays it in A Night at Casablanca this time with a smaller jazz orchestra, and later on, Harpo plays the rhapsody as his harp solo. Classical Net - Basic Repertoire List - Liszt Franz Liszt (1811 - 1886) Franz Liszt (October 22, 1811 - July 31, 1886) was a major figure in 19th-century music, an innovator in the way he combined a fierce and unquenchable creative fire with a fully developed connoisseur's appreciation of both the music of contemporary composers and of giant figures from the past. The only child of Adam and Anna Liszt, Franz was born in Raiding, Hungary.

The small town came under the administrative aegis of the Esterházy family who employed Adam as a steward. Franz showed musical promise early, beginning lessons with his father before he was six; by the age of seven he was writing music. Three years later the boy was ready to make his concert debut in the nearby town of Sopron. This was followed by two more concerts performed before the cream of Austrian society. As a direct result, young Franz was given an annual stipend for six years to enable him to concentrate solely on a musical career. His father secured Karl Czerny, an ex-pupil of Ludwig van Beethoven , as Franz's piano teacher, while Antonio Salieri taught him theory. As both Czerny and Salieri lived in Vienna, the family moved there in 1821. During his time in Vienna Liszt had the good fortune to meet Beethoven, who although profoundly deaf, attended one of his concerts and bestowed his blessing on the boy.

Franz's reputation spread quickly, and before the end of 1821 he had been chosen as one of 50 composers (others included Beethoven, Czerny and Salieri) to write a set of variations to a waltz written by the composer/publisher Diabelli. By the autumn of 1823 Franz's father decided it was time to widen his son's audience and moved the family to Paris. Liszt took the Parisians by storm. He also completed his musical education by taking private lessons from Anton Reicha and Ferdinando Paer. A visit to London in 1824 was a triumph, crowned by a private concert before George IV. By late 1825 Franz had even composed a one-act opera, Don Sanche, which was premiered in Paris to a mixed reaction. The next two years brought constant travel through much of Europe, financial rewards and the premieres of a stream of juvenile works, few of which have survived in their original form. By the summer of 1827 Franz, still only 16, was exhausted and took to his bed in Paris.

Doctors recommended a cure at the baths in Boulogne, to which both father and son repaired. Shortly after their arrival, Franz's father, aged 51, died from typhoid. The death of his father forced Liszt to re-evaluate his career choices. Already deeply disaffected with the life of a touring virtuoso, he found the prospect of prolonging it repugnant. For him, music was a noble calling; being "a musician in the employ of the rich, who patronized me and paid me like an itinerant entertainer" he felt to be degrading. Arranging for his mother to join him in Paris, he earned a living by teaching piano to the children of the rich and influential, falling deeply in love with the 16-year-old daughter of a cabinet minister. Though his feelings were reciprocated, her father objected and the girt was quickly married off to a socially acceptable suitor. Liszt never forgot her, even making provision for her in his will. For several years he withdrew from the world, and even considered entering a seminary. He had lost the way forward. It took the 1830 revolution in France to present him with a solution.

For a young man with a passionate commitment to social equality and democracy, the overthrow of an autocratic monarch was profoundly inspiring: he immediately planned a Revolutionary symphony to express his sentiments, and although he never progressed very far with the idea, it had the effect of bringing him out into the world again. A series of musical events in 1830-31 cemented his renewed ties with humanity and confirmed the form his artistic voice would take. Attending the first performance of Hector Berlioz 's Symphonie fantastique, Liszt was overwhelmed by the vivid expression of such turbulent ideas and emotions. He applauded wildly according to Berlioz, dragging him off "for dinner at his house and overwhelming me with his enthusiasm". The two became friends, Liszt learning a great deal from Berlioz about scoring for an orchestra. Three months later he was in the audience at Niccolò Paganini 's Paris début. Once again he was overwhelmed, this time by the sheer demonic pitch of Paganini's virtuosity, and his charismatic presence.

Soon after the concert, he began work on the first Étude d'exécution transcendante d'après Paganini, works long regarded as a set of impossibly difficult piano pieces. At the end of 1831 Frédéric Chopin (then aged 21) arrived in Paris and held his first concert. Liszt was again present and, true to his open nature, immediately declared his belief in Chopin's genius, a belief that was never shaken. All these composers helped define the approach Liszt took towards his own compositional wizardry and helped him to mould his talents until his audiences became as possessed by his music as himself. But it required one more event to put all these encounters into perspective: in 1833 Liszt, still only 22, fell in love with Countess Marie d'Agoult, a married woman of 28. The impact was mutual. Marie recorded her feelings for him: "With passion he uttered thoughts and opinions totally strange to ears like mine, accustomed as they were to hearing only banal, conventional views". Although deeply moved, Marie delayed for over a year.

They finally eloped to Switzerland, where for the next four years they lived together, Marie producing two daughters (Blandine and Cosima) and one son (Daniel), and Franz composing and enlarging his intellectual horizons. He also gave the occasional concert. By 1838 Liszt was traveling more widely; his ardor for Marie had cooled. By the end of 1839 they were living apart, Marie in Paris while Liszt continued to develop his concert career. Liszt's mother took over the education of the children-against Marie's wishes. For the next ten years Liszt continued to build his already towering reputation and by the late 1840s he was unchallenged as the greatest virtuoso of his day. It was his pre-eminence that ushered in the solo "recital" whereby a single artist would mostly perform for an entire program. In Liszt's case, the recital's music usually consisted of his own compositions. These recitals were given throughout Europe, including Britain, Turkey and Russia. The money that these tours generated forced Liszt to take on a personal manager, thus freeing him to conduct his personal life as he saw fit.

This inevitably meant affairs – many of them notorious – with leading female personalities of the day. In his travels he also met many musicians and composers, from the Clara and Robert Schumann in Leipzig to Mikhail Glinka in Moscow and Richard Wagner (then penniless and virtually unknown) in Weimar. The connection with Weimar was to grow in significance; in 1842 he was given a largely honorary conducting position by Grand Duke Carl Alexander (holding his first concert in Weimar in 1844), and over the next few years he became increasingly involved in the planning of the city's cultural development. This would inevitably involve Liszt in Wagner's rise to fame. The event that finally precipated the move to Weimar was his meeting while on tour in Kiev with Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, an immensely rich Polish aristocrat already separated from her German husband, a member of the Tsar's military elite. Their decision to marry entailed Carolyne, a devout Catholic, obtaining a divorce that required special permission from the Tsar. The Princess's belief in the spiritual nature of Liszt's artistic calling helped him decide to abandon his largely frustrating (although very lucrative) concert career.

By the spring of 1848 they were settling into life in Weimar. This was harder for the Princess than for Liszt; living openly with him, she was snubbed by Weimar society and her estate in the Ukraine sequestered by the Russian state as part of the eventual secular divorce settlement in 1852. Despite these obstacles, their rented house in Weimar became a major centre for artists, musicians and writers. During this settled period Liszt began composing his first orchestral works, initiating the series of tone poems that would remain one of his most distinctive compositional legacies – Tasso, Lamento e Trionfo and Les Préludes for example – and planning his Weimar musical seasons. Looming large in his plans was a production of Wagner's Lohengrin. (Wagner attended the rehearsals while on the run from the authorities in Dresden for his part in the 1848-49 uprisings all over Europe.) Liszt personally arranged for Wagner's flight to Switzerland.

Wagner was not the only beneficiary of Liszt's generosity in Weimar: in the years before his 1859 resignation, Liszt mounted no fewer than 11 new productions of contemporary operas, including three from Wagner, Berlioz's Benvenuto Cellini, Giacomo Meyerbeer 's Les Huguenots, Giuseppe Verdi 's Ernani, Schumann's Genoveva and Franz Schubert 's neglected Alfonso und Estrella. Virtually everyone made the pilgrimage to Weimar, some remaining close to Liszt (von Bolow marrying Cosima Liszt in 1857), others, like Johannes Brahms , only fleetingly held in awe by the great man's talent. Even good friends like the Schumanns found Liszt's compositions too much, as Clara commented after a visit from the pianist in the early 1850s: "Oh! What terrible composition! If a youngster were to write such stuff, one might forgive him, but what can one say when a full-grown man is so deluded?".

The critic Eduard Hanslick called his challenging B minor sonata of 1853 "a brazen concatenation of utterly disparate elements…anybody who has heard this thing and liked it is beyond hope". The 1860s brought a series of disasters, presaged by the death in 1859 of Liszt's gifted only son, Daniel, from consumption; in 1861 the Pope refused to spiritually sanction the Princess' legal annulment; in 1862 his beloved daughter, Blandine, died; in 1863 his second daughter, Cosima, abandoned her husband Hans von Bolow, and eloped with none other than Richard Wagner, to Liszt's chagrin. The breach between father and daughter was never healed. Tired of the strife in Weimar; Liszt joined the Princess who was already in Rome on a pilgrimage, and devoted himself exclusively to religious music, even taking the four minor orders, which allowed him to assume the title of Abb�. The death in 1861 of the Princess's husband had left the way clear for a new attempt to marry, but neither had the will for it any longer.

After 1864 they were not to meet again. By the end of the decade Liszt had written a series of devotional works, including The Legend of Saint Elizabeth, and had permanently adopted the wearing of a cassock. He was also invited back to Weimar to give a series of master-class demonstrations; these were to continue for the rest of his life, Liszt spending part of each year in Weimar. He also developed his relationship with Budapest, nurturing his love for his homeland, and in 1870 was appointed President of Budapest's music academy. He now divided each year between Weimar, Budapest and Rome. In 1872 he came to a reconciliation of sorts with Cosima and Richard Wagner; now married and well advanced with their dream of building the Bayreuth theatre. Liszt's last great oratorio, Christus, was premiered at Weimar in 1873, with Wagner and Cosima present. Liszt remained a focal point for the best young talents of the day, and as his attachment to Rome receded, his involvement in their developing careers increased.

In 1876 his old lover, Countess Marie d'Agoult, died in France, but he was left unmoved. Later that year, the Bayreuth premiere of Wagner's Ring cycle gave him more to be moved by, as did the acclamation he received at the 1878 Universal Exhibition in Paris, when his old enemy Eduard Hanslick proposed that he should be made honorary president of the Exhibition's musical jury. Yet the pattern of his life – Weimar-Budapest-Rome, with the occasional sortie to Bayreuth – did little to relieve his weariness. His rootlessness and the gradual deterioration of his health led to the diminution of his powers, while a series of piano works written in his last decade, most of them filled with a deep melancholy, leaving the impression of a troubled soul. In particular; four pieces written close to the time of Wagner's death in 1883 have an existential angst that is deeply disturbing. By his last years Liszt and the Princess had drifted apart entirely; she refused to leave Rome and he was increasingly loath to go there.

His health was giving out and he tended to remain within reach of the Wagners, and was deeply touched by Wagner's dedication of Parsifal to him. Yet with Wagner's death, Cosima pushed him away. His chief pleasure now was teaching the piano to his young pupils. With his eyesight considerably impaired and his energy gone, he rarely played in public. By the summer of 1886 he was virtually blind, his body invaded by dropsy. He returned, ailing, to Weimar where he had a devoted young companion, Lina Schmallhausen, to comfort him. He died from pneumonia in July, and was buried in Bayreuth during the festival. Central to Liszt's achievement was his prodigious keyboard virtuosity, his inventiveness and his ability to devise new techniques that revolutionized the approach to the instrument. Thus it may be held that his copious solo piano output is the most crucial part of his legacy, including the B minor Piano Sonata, his Années de Pèlerinage and the etudes. But his orchestral tone poems – the so-called programme music – are in a real sense his most permanent imaginative achievement.

The Dante and Faust symphonies are both major testaments to a concern with literal and philosophical truths expressed in music, and as such are central to the 19th-century Romantic tradition. They are also clear examples of the sometimes demoniacal energies to be found in his music. Liszt has also often been cited as important in these works in his coining and development of the idea of theme transformation, rather than the more traditional ideas of Classical development. This approach perhaps reached its apotheosis in Wagner. Recommended Recordings How Hungarian was Liszt? How Hungarian was Liszt? Coby Lubliner To Franz Liszts biographers, his nationality is a matter of controversy. But most people, be they ordinary listeners of music or writers of encyclopedia articles, think of him as Hungarian. It is certainly because he is perceived as a Hungarian that a biographical film about Liszt was called Hungarian Rhapsody, not because he had composed a series of pieces with that title; otherwise a film about Brahms might well have been titled Hungarian Dance. Nor is there any doubt that Liszt thought of himself as a Hungarian.

Early in 1840, when he addressed the public at his first concert in Pest upon his return to his native Hungary after an absence of almost two decades, he began with the famous words Je suis Hongrois (or, more likely, Hongrais, as I will explain below). Yes, he said it in French. For Liszt had not simply forgotten his Hungarian; he had never learned it. In 1873 he wrote, in a letter to a friend, Man darf mir wohl gestatten, dass ungeachtet meiner beklagenwerthen Unkentniss der ungarischen Sprache, ich von Geburt bis zum Grabe im Herzen und Sinne, Magyar verbleibe (It must surely be conceded to me that, regardless of my lamentable ignorance of the Hungarian language, I remain from birth to the grave, in heart and mind, a Magyar). What kind of Hungarian, then, was Franz Liszt? For one thing, the phrase his native Hungary must be read with some caution.

A present-day traveler in Hungary would not find Liszts birthplace there, for its located in the town of Raiding, in the Austrian province (land) of Burgenland. There are two things to be remarked about the just-cited letter. The first is that its language is German, Liszts native tongue. After he was brought by his parents to live in Paris at the age of twelve, French very quickly became his primary medium of expression  witness his Pest declaration  and the overwhelming majority of his letters, even those addressed to other ethnic Germans (including his Austrian-born mother), are in French. His German schooling in Raiding was rudimentary, and, as he attested several times, he found it a chore to write in German. For him to do so would imply that the recipient (in this case a Hungarian nobleman) was not proficient in French, something most unusual for an educated European in the nineteenth century. The other salient feature is Liszts self-reference as Magyar.

The usual German word to designate a Hungarian, especially when the intended meaning is that of a native or a citizen of Hungary, is Ungar, while Magyar is used (as in English) primarily to denote Hungarian ethnicity. One of the cornerstones of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which was already in full bloom at the time of the letter, was the recognition of minority nationalities (strictly observed in Austrian lands, much less so in Hungary  more on that later). And it so happened that nationality was defined precisely by primary language (and not, as in the Ottoman Empire, by religion  one of the reasons why Austro-Hungarian Jews did not have nationality status). A Magyar who was ignorant of the Hungarian language was, then, a contradiction in terms. Liszt was an Austro-Hungarian citizen, but it is unlikely that he was aware of the contradiction implied by calling himself a Magyar.

In his book Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (Of the Gypsies and of Their Music in Hungary, published in 1859) he occasionally uses Magyar, but mostly  and seemingly without distinction  Hongrois, except that he spelled it Hongrais, a variant form representing an older pronunciation that, as Liszts friend Victor Hugo wrote in Les Misérables, was practiced by King Louis-Philippe (whom they both admired) and may well have been used by Liszt himself. The issue of nationality must have struck the young Franz Liszt soon after his arrival in Paris, when he was refused admission to the Conservatoire. It turned out that, about a year before, the minister in charge, the Marquis de Lauriston, had issued a decree stating  somewhat redundantly  that no non-French foreign student was to be admitted (on nadmettra aucun élève étranger non français), and while the minister could make exceptions in very rare cases, he chose not to do so for Liszt, despite a letter of recommendation from Metternich.

The Spanish prodigy Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga, by the way, got in just before the decree went into effect. If Franz was non français, then what was he? The obvious answer would have been autrichien. The Kingdom of Hungary, on whose western fringe he was born, was ruled by Austria, and represented in Paris by the Austrian embassy. Ethnically he was undistinguishable from an Austrian; his mother, as noted above, was a native of Austria proper. Moreover, as an Austrian musician he would have been viewed as a successor to Haydn and Mozart, whom the French remembered fondly. But his father, Adam Liszt (originally List  he Magyarized the spelling of the name in order to facilitate its pronunciation by Hungarians), instilled in Franz the sense of being Hungarian, even though Adam himself seems to have been of purely German ancestry and spoke only a smattering of Hungarian. (Adams father Georg adopted the changed spelling late in life, after his grandson made it famous.) The emphasis on the Liszts Hungarian identity seems to have come to the fore after they left Hungary for Vienna, when Franz was ten.

The first printed mention of Franz Liszt appears in a German-language newspaper in Bratislava (then a largely German-speaking city called Pressburg, though it was also, as Pozsony [in Hungarian] or Istropolis [in Latin], the seat of the Hungarian Diet). Its a rave review of a recital by the nine-year-old prodigy at the house of Count Michael Eszterházy, but what makes it interesting is the typesetting. By a typographic convention that was in effect well into the nineteenth century, German-language text was normally printed in fraktur (black letter), but any interpolated non-German words (including names) were set in antiqua (roman). In this case the name Eszterházy, being Hungarian, is set in antiqua, but Liszts is in fraktur (actually written as Lißt), indicating that the reviewer (or editor) did not perceive the German-speaking boy as a Hungarian.

Two and a half years later, the announcement  almost certainly composed by Adam  of Franzs concert in Vienna not only has the qualification aus Ungarn gebürtig (a native of Hungary) following the name, but Liszt is set in antiqua. * * * The failure on Franz Liszts part to distinguish between ethnic and political nationality may be due to the fact that, in the course of his intellectual growing-up in France, he absorbed the peculiarly Western (in the words of the noted nationality scholar Anthony D. Smith), and specifically French, conception of the nation, which was defined by the Abbé Siéyès  one of the heroes of the Revolution  as a legal entity (personne juridique) constituted by all the individuals constituting the state. Nor was any other definition tolerated.

It is repugnant, said the Comte de Clermont-Tonnerre, another figure of the Revolution, for there to be a nation within a nation. The Bourbon Restoration, under which Liszts teenage years were spent, was in many ways a throwback to the Ancien Régime, but the Revolutions concept of the nation was consistent with Bourbon centralism, and survived intact. He came of age with the July Monarchy, whose king  the aforementioned Louis-Philippe  pointedly did not bear the title of roi de France (king of France) used by his predecessors but roi des Français (king of the French). The designation roi des Français had occasionally been used in the late Middle Ages, but as a mistranslation of the original title, rex Francorum, which meant king of the Franks in a tribal sense, and which was borne by all the Frankish kings, Merovingian or Carolingian, whatever part of the often fractured Frankish kingdom they might rule over.

After the final east-west division of the kingdom in the ninth century, however, the eastern kings, whose subjects were predominantly members of German tribes, came to style themselves rex Germanicus (German king), so that rex Francorum came to designate only the western kings. The land over which they reigned, however nominally, came to be called Francia, and the title eventually became rex Franciae. Moreover, all their vassals, whatever their actual ethnicity, came to be called Franci. This is what the Bayeux tapestry of 1076 calls William the Conquerors soldiers (who were Normans, not Franks), and what contemporary and near-contemporary accounts (such as the Gesta Francorum and the Gesta Dei per Francos) calls the participants in the First Crusade (1095), while in the Spanish Cantar de Mío Cid (early twelfth century) it is the Catalans who are labeled francos, since Catalonia was theoretically subject to kings of France until the Treaty of Corbeil (1258).

To Louis-Philippe, however, the Français whose king he was were not his subjects or vassals but his fellow citizens, and he was in fact known as the Citizen King. Indeed, as I have proposed elsewhere , the feudal habit of identifying ones nationality with the title of ones overlord was one of the factors that led to the development of the Western nation-state: as feudal power declined, allegiance shifted naturally from the feudal lord to the monarch. Furthermore, the prevalence of Latin as the language of church and state made language-based ethnicity relatively unimportant as a badge of nationality. In Hungary, certain medieval traditions survived longer than in Western Europe. One of them was the status of Latin as the official language of the kingdom until 1844 (Hungarian became the administrative language only in 1836). Another was the privileged status of the nobility: only nobles could own land, and they paid no taxes.

The power that the high-ranking nobles, known as magnates, exercised over their hereditary domains  including the practice of droit du seigneur for which Prince Nicholas Ferdinand Eszterházy (Adam Liszts employer) was notorious  was not unlike that of medieval feudal lords. The entire nobility of the Hungarian kingdom, regardless of ethnicity, was known as the Natio Hungarica or Hungarian nation (except that in Transylvania there were, historically, two other nationes: the ethnic Germans, known as Saxons, and the Székely, ethnically Hungarian but with the distinction that all of them were considered noble; the Vlachs or ethnic Romanians, who formed the majority, did not count). Thus an upper-class Croat, Slovak or Serb in Hungary could thus say Hungarus sum (I am Hungarian) without necessarily betraying his roots. Magyarization  the gradual imposition of the Hungarian language throughout the Kingdom of Hungary  actually had its beginnings around 1790, as a reaction to Emperor Joseph IIs failed policy of Germanization.

At the same time, however, the non-Magyar ethnic groups (who together formed a majority of Hungarys population) began to develop their own national consciousness, following Herders new model of nationality based on language and culture, and to seek cultural autonomy for their communities. This was true, at least, among the urban middle classes. But there were those who, though socially they might be middle-class or even of the minor nobility, were in a quasi-feudal relation with the magnates, and, whatever their actual ethnicity, followed the medieval custom of identifying their nationality with that of their masters. Two of the greatest figures of Hungarian nationalism, the politician Lajos Kossuth (the son of a Slovak father and a German mother) and the poet Sándor Petőfi (Serb father originally named Petrović, Slovak mother), come from this background (Kossuths father was a lawyer working for the Andrássy family). Perhaps because of their mixed parentage, Kossuth and Petőfi were raised speaking Hungarian, but their self-identification as Magyars had a mystical, romantic cast that went well beyond language.

Kossuth went so far as to deny the existence of a Slovak nation, to claim that he could not find Croatia on the map, and to proclaim (to a delegation of Serbs seeking autonomy) that the only nation that exists in the Hungarian Kingdom is the Magyar nation. And a magyar nemzet, though a literal translation of Natio Hungarica, meant something far different, just as Magyar vagyok, the title (and recurrent phrase) of one of Petőfis most famous poems, was not the same as the old Hungarus sum. Similarly, Georg and Adam List/Liszt were, in terms of educational status, what might be considered middle-class (they were at various times schoolteachers, musicians and accountants). But Adam, like Georg before him, spent most of his life in the employ  in various capacities  of the princely house of Eszterházy, in something very much like a feudal relationship. And so, in declaring himself (and his son) a Hungarian, he implicitly followed the medieval model of nationality as well.

But Adam Liszt had another motive for emphasizing his and his sons Hungarian identity: it was his way of expressing his indebtedness to the aristocrats who supported Franzs career, from that first concert in Pressburg. It was their help that made possible the Liszts stay in Vienna, where young Franz got to study with Carl Czerny, and the concert tour that eventually took them to Paris. Once Franz Liszt became a celebrity, it was the Natio Hungaricas turn to embrace him. Since it was clear from his first appearance in Pest that he was not ethnically a Magyar despite proclaiming Je suis Hongrois, the way to make him a Hungarus was to find noble roots for him. At that Pest concert he was dressed in a Hungarian noblemans traditional costume, and a group of noblemen presented him with a symbolic saber. Some members of the nobility began a formal effort to make him one of their own, presumably by finding a connection (now known to be fictitious) with an extinct lineage named Listhi.

These efforts came to naught; there were absolutely no documents, even false ones, indicating such a connection, and when Liszt was finally ennobled by Emperor Francis Joseph, it was, as Franz Ritter von Liszt, a knight of the Austrian Empire and not of the Hungarian Kingdom. To many in the audience at that concert, the highlight was Liszts performance of a bravura arrangement of the Rákóczi March, the unofficial national anthem of the Magyars (the official Himnusz , with music by Erkel and text beginning God bless the Magyars, was not written until 1844). The march was a highlight of his concerts throughout that Hungarian tour. But when he played it in the largely Saxon city of Hermannstadt in Transylvania (now the Romanian city of Sibiu), the performance received whistles (the European equivalent of boos). Here, too, he does not seem to have understood that citizens of Hungary did not necessarily think of themselves as Magyars. Though Liszt never formally became one of the Hungarian nobility, his personal connections with Hungarians seem to have remained within it.

If his correspondence is any indication, he does not seem to have known any Hungarians of the middle class, let alone any Magyar peasants who might sing or play genuine folk music. Hence there was nothing in Liszts experience to counteract his mistaken belief, expounded in his aforementioned book about the Gypsies, that what he heard from the Gypsy musicians of the ethnically mixed region of his birth, and what furnished the thematic material of the compositions that he called Hungarian Rhapsodies, was Magyar folk music. Much of the book is devoted to praising the Gypsies for their musical gifts and their untrammeled lifestyle while, by contrast, gratuitously denigrating the Jews for their lack of artistic originality and, of course, their greed. Liszt seems to have believed that only the Gypsies, not the Magyars themselves, were the true carriers of the folk music of Hungary. The fact that the csárdás  the archetypal Hungarian musical form that Liszt called hongraise  was created by the Jewish violinist and composer Márk Rózsavölgyi goes unmentioned in the book.

(In fairness to Liszt, the books anti-Semitic tone may well be due to its having been written largely by his Ukrainian mistress, Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein. Liszt had several Jewish students and friends, including Moritz Rosenthal, Carl Tausig and Hermann Levi.) * * * A failure to understand the ethnic aspect of nationality in Hungary could be excused in someone who, like Liszt, was educated in the West. It is far less excusable for the leaders of Hungarian nationalism in the nineteenth century, specifically those of the Kossuth-Petőfi stripe, to disregard, in their relentless campaign of Magyarization, the aspirations of the non-Magyar nationalities in Hungary. While most of the European Revolutions of 1848 failed, the failure of the Hungarian one was due in no small measure to the fact that the Croats, Romanians, Serbs and Slovaks of Hungary took the Austrian side. And while there were Hungarian leaders, such as Ferenc Deák and Count István Széchenyi, who were far more understanding of the problem of nationalities, theirs was not the path that was taken.

A few years ago I published an essay titled Turkeys Turkish Problem , in which I pointed out that modern Turkeys self-definition  a legacy from Atatürk  as a nation-state in the Western sense (that is, a state in which nationality and citizenship are equivalent) is geographically out of place, since Turkey lies to the east of the Seipel line , in a part of the world where the prime determiner of nationality (and nationalism) is ethnicity. Consequently Turkeys supposed Kurdish problem, rooted in the unwillingness to recognize the Kurds as a national minority, is in reality a Turkish problem. In my essay, I neglected to cite an earlier example of such a misplaced definition: post-Ausgleich Hungary.

(To the Austrian statesman Ignaz Seipel, who first articulated the concept of the line to which I have given his name, his own country  and hence ipso facto Hungary  lay to the east of it.) When the Habsburg empire was re-formed, in 1867, as the Austro-Hungarian dual monarchy, it was supposed to be on the basis of equal cultural (specifically linguistic) rights for all of its many nationalities, and the Austrian half promptly instituted such rights (in some places even to the detriments of ethnic Germans, as in the borderlands of Bohemia and Moravia). Even the imperial anthem Gott erhalte Franz den Kaiser was translated, on the orders of Francis Joseph, into the various national languages of the Empire. In Hungary, however, the Law of Nationalities of 1868, which was supposed to do the same thing, had a preamble beginning Since all citizens of Hungary, according to the principles of the constitution, form from a political point of view one nation  the indivisible unitary Hungarian nation  of which every citizen of the fatherland is a member, no matter to what nationality he belongs...

The translation is taken from a 1908 book titled Racial Problems in Hungary by Scotus Viator, the pen name of a Scottish journalist named R.W. Seton-Watson. (Note that, in the usage of a century ago, racial is equivalent to the modern ethnic.) Viator comments: Like so many other laws on the statute-book of Hungary, the Law of Nationalities is vitiated by employing in the original text only a single word (magyar) for two essentially different conceptions  Hungarian, the wide geographical term embracing the whole territory of St. Stephen, and Magyar, the narrow racial term, applicable only to one out of the many nationalities of the country.

The ambiguity of the phrase becomes apparent when the political unity of a magyar nemzet (the Hungarian nation) is under discussion; for the attempt has often been made to define a magyar nemzet as az uralkodó nemzet, in other words as the ruling race, not as the Hungarian nation. The law continues: Since by reason of the political unity of the nation the state language of Hungary is the Magyar, the language of deliberation and business in the Hungarian Parliament is in future also the Magyar; the laws will be promulgated in the Magyar language, but are also to be published in an authentic translation in the languages of all other nationalities inhabiting the country; the official language of the Government in all branches of the administration is in future also the Magyar. While the law goes on to enumerate situations under which languages other than Hungarian could be used, in fact the old policy of Magyarization remained in place, especially with regard to Slovaks. And the Himnusz was required to be sung in Hungarian only.

Needless to say, the minority nationalities  except for the Jews, who believed they would benefit from being counted as Magyars  did not accept the Magyars position, and continued to agitate for autonomy. In 1895, an assembly representing Romanians, Serbs and Slovaks published a twenty-one-point program, whose second point asserted that [t]he idea of a Magyar national state is a contradiction of the ethnical conditions of Hungary and her historic development, and threatens the existence of the other peoples. The assembly furthermore decided to form a League to protect their nationalities in all legal ways, and hope that the Germans and Ruthenes will join them. The minority nationalities rejection of the Hungarian idea led to the eventual dismemberment of the kingdom; all the areas where non-Magyars were in a majority voted, following the Treaty of Trianon, to join neighboring countries.

In particular, Liszts true countrymen, the Germans who formed the majority of his native region (which they called Deutsch-Westungarn [German Western Hungary]), decided (except for the city of Sopron/Ödenburg) to join the similarly truncated Austria, which at first was called Deutsch-Österreich (German Austria) before the name was forbidden by the Treaty of Saint-Germain. Chances are that if any descendants of Sebastian List (Georgs father)  that is, Franz Liszts kinfolk  were still living there, they would have voted the same way. August 15, 2006 Franz Liszt | Hungarian composer | Britannica.com Hungarian composer César Franck Franz Liszt, Hungarian form Liszt Ferenc (born October 22, 1811, Raiding, Hungary —died July 31, 1886, Bayreuth , Germany ), Hungarian piano virtuoso and composer. Among his many notable compositions are his 12 symphonic poems, two (completed) piano concerti, several sacred choral works, and a great variety of solo piano pieces.

Franz Liszt, oil on canvas by Henri Lehmann, 1840; in the Carnavalet Museum, Paris. G. Dagli Orti—IGDA/© DeA Picture Library Youth and early training Liszt’s father, Ádám Liszt, was an official in the service of Prince Nicolas Eszterházy , whose palace in Eisenstadt was frequented by many celebrated musicians. Ádám Liszt was a talented amateur musician who played the cello in the court concerts. By the time Franz was five years old, he was already attracted to the piano and was soon given lessons by his father. He began to show interest in both church and Gypsy music . He developed into a religious child, also because of the influence of his father, who during his youth had spent two years in the Franciscan order. Franz began to compose at the age of eight. When only nine he made his first public appearance as a concert pianist at Sopron and Pozsony (now Bratislava, Slovakia). His playing so impressed the local Hungarian magnates that they put up the money to pay for his musical education for the next six years.

Ádám obtained leave of absence from his post and took Franz to Vienna, where he had piano lessons with Carl Czerny , a composer and pianist who had been a pupil of Ludwig van Beethoven , and studied composition with Antonio Salieri , the musical director at the Viennese court. He gave several concerts in Vienna, with great success. The legend that Beethoven attended one of Liszt’s concerts and kissed the prodigy on the forehead is considered apocryphal—but Liszt certainly met Beethoven. Liszt moved with his family to Paris in 1823, giving concerts in Germany on the way. He was refused admission to the Paris Conservatoire because he was a foreigner; instead, he studied with Anton Reicha, a theorist who had been a pupil of Joseph Haydn’s brother Michael, and Ferdinando Paer , the director of the Théâtre-Italien in Paris and a composer of light operas. Liszt’s Paris debut on March 7, 1824, was sensational. Other concerts quickly followed, as well as a visit to London in June.

He toured England again the following year, playing for George IV at Windsor Castle and also visiting Manchester, where his New Grand Overture was performed for the first time. This piece was used as the overture to his one-act opera Don Sanche, which was performed at the Paris Opéra on October 17, 1825. In 1826 he toured France and Switzerland, returning to England again in the following year. Suffering from nervous exhaustion, Liszt expressed a desire to become a priest. His father took him to Boulogne to take sea baths to improve his health; there Ádám died of typhoid fever. Liszt returned to Paris and sent for his mother to join him; she had gone back to the Austrian province of Styria during his tours. Britannica Stories EU Considers Rules For Robots Liszt now earned his living mainly as a piano teacher, and in 1828 he fell in love with one of his pupils. When her father insisted that the attachment be broken off, Liszt again became extremely ill; he was considered so close to death that his obituary appeared in a Paris newspaper.

After his illness he underwent a long period of depression and doubt about his career. For more than a year he did not touch the piano and was dissuaded from joining the priesthood only through the efforts of his mother. He experienced much religious pessimism. During this period Liszt took an active dislike to the career of a virtuoso. He made up for his previous lack of education by reading widely, and he came into contact with many of the leading artists of the day, including Alphonse de Lamartine , Victor Hugo , and Heinrich Heine . With the July Revolution of 1830 resulting in the abdication of the French king Charles X and the coronation of Louis-Philippe, he sketched out a Revolutionary Symphony. Listen: “campanella, La” Excerpt from La campanella (“The Bell”), number three of … Between 1830 and 1832 he met three men who were to have a great influence on his artistic life. At the end of 1830 he first met Hector Berlioz and heard the first performance of his Symphonie fantastique .

From Berlioz he inherited the command of the Romantic orchestra and also the diabolic quality that remained with him for the rest of his life. He achieved the seemingly impossible feat of transcribing Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique for the piano in 1833, and he helped Berlioz by transcribing other works of his and playing them in concert. In March 1831 he heard Niccolò Paganini play for the first time. He again became interested in virtuoso technique and resolved to transfer some of Paganini’s fantastic violin effects to the piano, writing a fantasia on his La campanella . At this time he also met Frédéric Chopin , whose poetical style of music exerted a profound influence on Liszt. Years with Marie d’Agoult Britannica Lists & Quizzes Editor Picks: Exploring 10 Types of Basketball Movies In 1834 Liszt emerged as a mature composer with the solo piano piece Harmonies poétiques et religieuses, based on a collection of poems by Lamartine, and the set of three Apparitions.

The lyrical style of these works is in marked contrast to his youthful compositions, which reflected the style of his teacher Czerny. In the same year, through the poet and dramatist Alfred de Musset , he met the novelist George Sand and also Marie de Flavigny, countess d’Agoult , with whom he began an affair. In 1835 she left her husband and family to join Liszt in Switzerland; their first daughter, Blandine, was born in Geneva on December 18. Liszt and Madame d’Agoult lived together for four years, mainly in Switzerland and Italy, though Liszt made occasional visits to Paris. He also taught at the newly founded Geneva Conservatory and published a series of essays, “ On the Position of Artists, ” in which he endeavoured to raise the status of the artist—who up to then had been regarded as a kind of superior servant—to that of a respected member of the community .

Liszt commemorated his years with Madame d’Agoult in the first two books of solo piano pieces collectively named Années de pèlerinage (1837–54; Years of Pilgrimage), which are poetical evocations of Swiss and Italian scenes. He also wrote the first mature version of the Transcendental Études (1838, 1851); these are works for solo piano based on his youthful Étude en 48 exercices, but here transformed into pieces of terrifying virtuosity. He transcribed for the piano six of Paganini’s pieces—five studies and La campanella—and also three Beethoven symphonies, some songs by Franz Schubert , and further works of Berlioz. He made these transcriptions to make the work of these men more available and thus spread the appreciation of their music, which was still greatly neglected at that time. Liszt also wrote a number of fantasias on popular operas of the day and dazzled audiences with them at his concerts.

Connect with Britannica Facebook Twitter YouTube Instagram Pinterest His second daughter, Cosima, was born in 1837 and his son, Daniel, in 1839, but toward the end of that year his relations with Madame d’Agoult became strained and she returned to Paris with the children. Liszt then returned to his career as a virtuoso to raise money for the Beethoven Memorial Committee in Bonn for the completion of its Beethoven monument. For the next eight years Liszt traveled all over Europe, giving concerts in countries as far apart as Ireland, Portugal, Turkey, and Russia. He continued to spend his summer holidays with Madame d’Agoult and the children on the island of Nonnenwerth in the Rhine River until 1844; then they finally parted, and Liszt took the children to Paris. Liszt’s brilliance and success were at their peak during these years as a virtuoso. Everywhere he was received with great adulation; gifts and decorations were showered on him, and he had numerous mistresses, including the dancer Lola Montez and Marie Duplessis. Nevertheless, he still continued to compose, writing songs as well as piano works.

His visit to Hungary in 1839–40, the first since his boyhood, was an important event. His renewed interest in the music of the Gypsies laid the foundations for his Hungarian Rhapsodies and other piano pieces composed in the Hungarian style. He also wrote a cantata for the Beethoven Festival of 1845, his first work for chorus and orchestra, and some smaller choral works. Compositions at Weimar In February 1847 Liszt met the princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein at Kiev and later spent some time at her estate in Poland. She quickly persuaded him to give up his career as a virtuoso and to concentrate on composition. He gave his final concert at Yelizavetgrad (Kirovograd) in September of that year. Having been director of music extraordinary to the Weimar court in Germany since 1843, and having conducted concerts there since 1844, Liszt decided to settle there permanently in 1848. He was later joined by the princess, who had unsuccessfully tried to obtain a divorce from her husband.

They resided together in Weimar, and Liszt now had ample time to compose, as well as to conduct the court orchestra in operas and concerts. This was the period of his greatest production: the first 12 symphonic poems, A Faust Symphony (1854; rev. 1857–61), A Symphony to Dante’s Divina Commedia (1855–56), the Piano Sonata in B Minor (1852–53), the Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-Flat Major (1849; rev. 1853 and 1856), and the Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major (1839; rev. 1849–61).

(A third piano concerto , in E-flat, composed in 1839, was left unperformed during his lifetime and was not discovered until 1988.) During the period in Weimar Liszt also composed the Totentanz for piano and orchestra, revised versions of the Transcendental and Paganini Études and of the first two books of the Années de pèlerinage, choral works, and numerous others. Some of these works had been sketched out in the 1840s or earlier, but, even so, his productivity in this period remains astonishing. Franz Liszt, lithograph by Joseph Kriehuber, 1846. Courtesy of the Museo Teatrale alla Scala, Milan Trending Topics Lady Flora Hastings The avant-garde composers of the day regarded Weimar as the one city where modern composers could be heard, and many of them came to Liszt as pupils. The so-called New German school hoisted the banner of modernism, which naturally annoyed the more academic musicians.

Some members of the Weimar court also were upset by Liszt’s continued support of the composer Richard Wagner , who had had to flee in 1849 with Liszt’s help from Germany to Switzerland because of his political activism. The straitlaced citizens of Weimar also objected strongly to the princess openly living with Liszt, and the grand duchess of Weimar was under pressure from her brother, Nicholas I of Russia, to ban Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein from all court functions. Furthermore, the grand duke who originally appointed Liszt died in 1853, and his successor took little interest in music. Liszt resigned five years later, and, though he remained in Weimar until 1861, his position there became more and more difficult. His son, Daniel, had died in 1859 at the age of 20. Liszt was deeply distressed and wrote the oration for orchestra Les Morts in his son’s memory. In May 1860 the princess had left Weimar for Rome in the hope of having her divorce sanctioned by the pope, and in September, in a troubled state of mind, Liszt had made his will.

He left Weimar in August of the following year, and after traveling to Berlin and Paris, where he saw Marie d’Agoult, he arrived in Rome. He and the princess hoped to be married on his 50th birthday. At the last moment, however, the pope revoked his sanction of the princess’s divorce; they both remained in Rome in separate establishments. Eight years in Rome For the next eight years Liszt lived mainly in Rome and occupied himself more and more with religious music. He completed the oratorios Die Legende von der heiligen Elisabeth (1857–62) and Christus (1855–66) and a number of smaller works. He hoped to create a new kind of religious music that would be more direct and moving than the rather sentimental style popular at the time. Liszt was one of the few 19th-century musicians to be interested in Gregorian plainsong, but his efforts were frowned on by the ecclesiastical authorities, and much of his sacred music remained unpublished until many years after his death. In 1862 his daughter Blandine died at the age of 26.

Liszt wrote his variations on a theme from the J.S. Bach cantata Weinen, Klagen (Weeping, Mourning) ending with the chorale Was Gott tut das ist wohlgetan (What God Does Is Well Done), which must have been inspired by this event. The princess’s husband died in 1864, but there was no more talk of marriage, and in 1865 Liszt took the four minor orders of the Roman Catholic Church, though he never became a priest. In 1867 he wrote the Hungarian Coronation Mass for the coronation of the emperor Francis Joseph I of Austria as king of Hungary. This commission renewed his links with his native land. Meanwhile, his daughter Cosima , who, at the age of 19, had married Liszt’s favourite pupil, Hans von Bülow , was having an affair with Richard Wagner. She had an illegitimate child by Wagner, which led to a quarrel between the two composers that lasted until 1872.

Last years In 1869 Liszt was invited to return to Weimar by the grand duke to give master classes in piano playing, and two years later he was asked to do the same in Budapest . From then until the end of his life he divided his time between Rome, Weimar, and Budapest. After a reconciliation with Wagner in 1872, Liszt regularly attended the Bayreuth festivals. He appeared occasionally as a pianist in charity concerts and continued to compose. His music began to lose some of its brilliant quality and became starker, more introverted, and more experimental in style. His later works anticipate the harmonic style of Claude Debussy , and one late work called Bagatelle Without Tonality anticipates Béla Bartók and even Arnold Schoenberg . Franz Liszt, undated photograph. Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. In 1886 Liszt left Rome for the last time. He attended concerts of his works in Budapest, Liège, and Paris and then went to London—his first visit there in 45 years—where several concerts of his works were given. He then went on to Antwerp, Paris, and Weimar.

He played for the last time at a concert in Luxembourg on July 19. Two days later he arrived in Bayreuth for the festival. His health had not been good for some months, and he went to bed with a high fever, though he still managed to attend two Wagner performances. His final illness developed into pneumonia, and his condition was not helped by the callous behaviour of Cosima, who left him alone in order to supervise the running of the festival. He died on July 31. Franz Liszt seated at the piano. Bain News Service/Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (LC-DIG-ggbain-06155) Assessment Liszt was not only the greatest piano virtuoso of his time but also a composer of enormous originality and a principal figure in the Romantic movement . As a composer he radically extended the technique of piano writing, giving the instrument not only brilliance but a full and rich, almost orchestral sound. Most of his compositions bear titles and are representations of some natural scene or of some poetic idea or work of literature or art.

Liszt extended the harmonic language of his time, even in his earlier works, and his later development of chromatic harmony helped lead eventually to the breakdown of tonality and ultimately to the atonal music of the 20th century. Liszt also invented the symphonic poem for orchestra and the method of “ transformation of themes,” by which one or two themes in different forms can provide the basis for an entire work—a principle from which Wagner derived his system of so-called leitmotifs in his operas. As a pianist Liszt was the first to give complete solo recitals, and he did a great deal to encourage the performance of music by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Berlioz, Wagner, and Robert Schumann by transcribing their works for piano and playing them in his concerts at a time when they were insufficiently appreciated. He also helped younger composers, including Edvard Grieg , Mily Balakirev , Aleksandr Borodin , and Claude Debussy, and he taught a number of pupils who themselves became famous virtuosos.

Apart from his more than 700 compositions, Liszt was the author of books on Frédéric Chopin, Hungarian Gypsy music, Wagner’s Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, John Field’s nocturnes, the lieder of Robert Franz , and the Goethe Foundation in Weimar. His published essays and correspondence fill many volumes. A controversial figure in his time, he was attacked for his innovations , and his rivals were jealous of his brilliance and panache. For a long time he was regarded merely as a superficial composer of brilliant trifles, but in recent years his true stature has been seen more clearly as that of a composer who revolutionized the music of his time and anticipated numerous later developments. As Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein said, “Liszt has flung his spear far into the future.” Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies - Wild Gypsy Fun Contact Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies - Wild Gypsy-inspired Fun Franz Liszt's 19 Hungarian Rhapsodies use gypsy tunes from his native Hungary, and combine them with his own dazzling piano writing. The colorful and flamboyant pieces which result tax pianists as much as delight listeners!

They're some of the composer's most amazing and popular pieces (especially the No. 2). For me, the pieces evoke images of stormy and passionate Hungarian gypsies, traveling slowly through romantic Eastern European countryside. Liszt was really proud of being Hungarian. But he was a little guilty that he couldn't speak the language very well and didn't live there. I think he wrote the Rhapsodies to try to promote Hungarian music and nationalism. He did a good job! Hungarian Music Liszt uses the gypsy scale heavily in the Rhapsodies, which is a series of notes that have a really exotic and Hungarian flavor. Liszt published the first set of the Rhapsodies in 1853. He then added four more towards the last years of his life, and made alterations to some of the earlier ones. I actually prefer a few of the older versions, but you can't argue with the composer himself! Liszt uses the piano to imitate the sounds in a gypsy band. One important element of these groups is the the accompaniment, which is played on a cimbalon (a box with strings which the player hits with small hammers).

I've heard one of these played live, and I have to say Liszt does an excellent job of reproducing the effect on the piano! Because they're Liszt pieces, they have astoundingly difficult passages, and loads of cadenzas (basically flashy show-off parts). They also have all sorts of crazy tricks, like three-hand illusions, where Liszt writes the music in such a way that it sounds like the pianist is playing with 3 hands! Here's an example of a three-hand illusion, from the Hungarian Rhapsody No. 9: When they're played by an extremely skilled pianist, they're really really fun to listen to. Here's one of my favorite melodies, for example: Liszt also used that melody in his lavish Hungarian Fantasia, a huge piece for piano and orchestra. Famous composer Johannes Brahms was also inspired by Hungarian music, and created another popular set of pieces based on those dizzying rhythms and exotic melodies: the Hungarian Dances . Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2 in C-sharp Minor The Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp Minor is by far the most famous of the lot.

It's been used countless times in movies and cartoons, and the main theme from the fast section is so well-known most people recognize the melody but not the composer! This is the first of the set I heard, and it became one of my favorite pieces after I listened to it a few more times. I even tried to play some of the melodies from it on the piano, but struggled a bit with some of the jumps in the left hand. It was probably (OK, definitely...) a few notches above my skill level at the time! The piece is really accessible for non-musicians, since the structure is quite simple. It's basically a slow section, then a fast section. That's it! It also helps that it has some extremely appealing melodies, and some amazing piano tricks for pianists to show off with. Here is my absolute favorite performance of this piece, by the famous pianist Alfred Brendel . Brendel - Rhapsodies He manages to capture the powerful and mature feeling of the slow section, and also keep rhythm incredibly well in the fast part (which is something I think a lot of pianists get wrong).

Listen to the way he controls the melody at 6:40 in this video to get an idea of what I mean. Incredible! My Favorites One of my favorite Rhapsodies is No. 5 in E Minor. I love the romantic power of the last segment - it always moves me. I think it's some of Liszt's most inspiring music. I also really like No. 8 in F-sharp Minor. It has everything that makes a Hungarian Rhapsody: a passionate, free-flowing slow segment, fantastic and brilliant piano acrobatics, and a blazingly fast finale with lively melodies. The Hungarian Rhapsodies are popular for their powerful melodies and virtuoso fireworks. The pieces are a perfect example of Liszt's superb piano composition skills, and his love for his native country. The question now is: which one is your favorite??

Question: Who composed ‘The Hungarian Rhapsodies’?
Answer: Franz LISZT