Washington, like the rest of the world, is celebrating the 200th birthday (10/22) of Franz Liszt, music's first superstar -- the greatest piano virtuoso of all time, or at least the 19th century, and a composer who changed the course of music.
The many events in Washington include concerts sponsored by the Embassy of Hungary and the Library of Congress, whose Franz Liszt Bicentenary Project showcases the Library's extensive Liszt holdings.
Also, Classical WETA 90.9 FM threw a "Liszt Birthday Bash Weekend" during the radio station's Liszt Month.
“Liszt was everything—virtuoso, composer, impresario, activist, flamboyant public and private figure, even a spiritual figure,” Juilliard's provost and dean Ara Guzelimian sums up the master.
Fellow pianist-composer Camille Saint-Saëns termed Liszt “the incontestable incarnation of the modern piano.” And as Saint-Saëns, whose 175th anniversary was celebrated last year, later pointed out, "The world persisted to the end in calling him the greatest pianist in order to avoid...considering (him) one of the most remarkable of composers."
Liszt's piano compositions are considered among the pinnacles of the literature, especially his "Sonata in B Minor"; he invented the symphonic poem, most famously "Mazeppa"; and he's generally credited with pioneering impressionism and atonal music long before Debussy and Schoenberg... This is in addition to creating some of music's most beloved works, from "Hungarian Rhapsodies" to "Mephisto" waltzes.
In the three-volume “Franz Liszt” (Knopf), biographer Alan Walker describes the Hungarian boy prodigy who became a phenomenon by age six, and as a young man, sparked “Lisztomania”.
“The swooning audiences, the endless supply of medals and decorations… Admirers swarmed all over him," Walker writes. "Ladies fought over his silk handkerchiefs and velvet gloves, which they then ripped to pieces as souvenirs.”
As Liszt himself proclaimed, "Le concert, c’est moi." The dynamic performer created the recital form, even the word "recital", and also established the master class.
Chopin, whose bicentennial was celebrated in 2010, said, "I should like to rob Liszt of the way he plays my études."
However, Liszt's numerous critics accused him of what one called “destroying the true art of piano playing.”
Controversy about his revolutionary, wildly expressive performing style, as well as his love life, hounded the celebrity.
Felix Mendelssohn assessed Liszt's character as "a continual alternation bewteen scandal and apotheosis."
Liszt's passionate love for the married Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein was strained by her long struggle for an annulment.
Also, Liszt was plagued by difficulties with his former mistress, Marie d’Agoult, the mother of their three children. Daughter Cosima became the mistress and later, the second wife of composer Richard Wagner, certainly no stranger to controversy himself.
For a less contentious, more creative life, Liszt relinquished his marathon recital tours at age 35 to devote himself to composing. His unique compositions, like his playing, stirred rage as well as rapture.
Many major composers of the time, including Chopin, Robert Schumann, and Hector Berlioz did not "care for Liszt's music, even though (Liszt) admired theirs and actively promoted it," Walker notes.
Liszt dedicated his "Sonata in B Minor" to Schumann, which his wife Clara, also a composer and virtuoso pianist, called "merely a blind noise..." At its premiere in 1857, "it provoked a minor scandal among the conservative critics, from which it recovered with difficulty," Walker writes. "Rarely did such great music get off to a less promising start."
Liszt's great musical influence will be honored in “The Liszt Legacy and Béla Bartók: Soloists from the Budapest Festival Orchestra with Pianist Jenő Jandó”, a free concert (tickets required) sponsored by the Embassy of Hungary and the Library of Congress on October 25 at 8 PM.
The chamber concert program was selected by Iván Fischer, former principal conductor of Washington's National Symphony Orchestra, and now music director of the Konzerthaus Berlin, and principal conductor of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin.
The Library of Congress says this about the program, "The splendid Budapest Festival Orchestra sends a group of top players for a special chamber concert tracing Liszt’s musical legacy in the work of another towering figure in Hungarian culture. Béla Bartók’s almost unknown, strongly Liszt-influenced 1903 Piano Quintet (is) a gem...recreated here with the esteemed Hungarian pianist Jenő Jandó." The program includes three other Bartók works.
A pre-concert presentation, "Liszt, Bartók, and music in modern Hungarian culture", will be given by Károly Dán, Consul General of Hungary at 6:15 PM in the Library's Whittall Pavilion (no tickets required).
For more info and tickets: Library of Congress, Concert Series, Coolidge Auditorium,Thomas Jefferson Building, Independence Avenue and First Street, SE, Washington, DC. Free, but tickets are required. Other Liszt 200th anniversary concerts are at the embassies of Austria and Germany, and at the National Gallery of Art.
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