Franz Liszt

Hungary, 1838–1886

Hungarian pianist and composer whose concert career set the model for the touring virtuoso. His late works use an increasingly chromatic and harmonically exploratory language.

MusicRoots documents 3 artists who influenced Franz Liszt and 11 artists Franz Liszt influenced in turn. Every connection cites a published source.

Who influenced Franz Liszt?

• Ludwig van Beethoven — Liszt studied with Beethoven's pupil Czerny, transcribed all nine symphonies for piano and championed Beethoven throughout his career.
• Hector Berlioz — Berlioz's programmatic conception of the orchestra was a direct model for Liszt's symphonic poems; Liszt transcribed the Symphonie fantastique in 1833.
• Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina — Liszt's late church music takes up the Palestrina model held up by the Cecilian reformers as the proper style for Catholic worship.

Which artists did Franz Liszt influence?

• Béla Bartók — Liszt was Bartók's Hungarian predecessor and an early pianistic model in his formation.
• Alexander Scriabin — Liszt was the model of virtuosity and of the synthesis of the arts that influenced Scriabin's late mystical conception.
• Richard Wagner — Liszt's harmonic daring fed directly into Wagner's late style — Wagner admitted becoming 'a quite different fellow as a harmonist' after studying Liszt's works.
• Camille Saint-Saëns — Liszt championed Saint-Saëns, premiered his Samson et Dalila in Weimar, and his symphonic poem form was Saint-Saëns's model; the Organ Symphony is dedicated to Liszt's memory.
• Bedřich Smetana — Liszt personally supported the young Smetana, arranged the publication of his Opus 1 and remained his model for the symphonic poem.
• Maurice Ravel — Liszt's pianistic virtuosity and orchestral colour were among the models behind Ravel's own dazzling keyboard writing.
• Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov — Liszt's programme music and orchestral colour were a model for Rimsky-Korsakov's symphonic poems, alongside Berlioz.
• Anton Rubinstein — From watching Liszt play in Paris (1840), the young Rubinstein learned the freedom of arm movement that underpinned his own titanic pianism.
• César Franck — Liszt encouraged Franck personally, compared his organ works to Bach's, and Liszt's thematic transformation underlies Franck's cyclic form.
• Richard Strauss — Liszt's symphonic poem was the form Strauss adopted outright — Don Juan and Also sprach Zarathustra descend directly from it.
• Ferruccio Busoni — Busoni was the supreme Liszt pianist of his age and editor of the collected edition — the declared inheritor of the Liszt tradition.