Franz Liszt was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor, and teacher, born 22 October 1811 in Raiding, then in the Kingdom of Hungary, and died 31 July 1886 in Bayreuth. Celebrated across Europe from the 1830s as one of the greatest pianists of his age, he later gave up the concert stage to focus on composition and conducting, serving as Kapellmeister in Weimar before taking minor holy orders in Rome in 1865. His enormous output spans virtuosic solo piano works, twelve symphonic poems, sacred choral music, and hundreds of piano transcriptions and arrangements of other composers’ music.

Liszt redefined the possibilities of piano technique and effectively invented the modern solo recital, while his innovations in thematic transformation and programmatic form, especially in the symphonic poem, opened new paths for later Romantic and modernist composers. As a tireless champion of other composers’ music through his transcriptions and as a mentor to a wide circle of pupils, he shaped the course of nineteenth-century music far beyond his own compositions.

Compare recordings piece by piece — 43 works of Franz Liszt with more than one performance on the site →

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franz_Liszt
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Franz-Liszt