Franz Liszt was born to German-speaking Marie Anna Lager and Adam Liszt on October 22, 1811, in the village of Raiding (Hungarian: Doborján) in Sopron County. His father would only employ usage of Hungarian when dealing, as steward, with the folk of the village in which the family settled. Nonetheless, a source credits Franz Liszt as Hungarian.
Liszt's father played the piano, violin, cello, and guitar. He had been in the services of Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy and knew Haydn, Hummel and Beethoven personally. At age six, Franz Liszt began listening attentively to his father's piano playing as well as to show an interest in both sacred and Romani music. Adam began teaching him the piano at age seven, and Franz Liszt began composing in an elementary manner when he was eight. He appeared in concerts at Sopron and Bratislava (Slovakia) in October and November 1820 at age 9. After the concerts, a group of wealthy sponsors offered to finance Franz's musical education abroad.
In Vienna, Liszt received piano lessons from Carl Czerny, who in his own youth had been a student of Beethoven and Hummel. He also received lessons in composition from Antonio Salieri, who was then music director of the Viennese court. His public debut in Vienna on December 1, 1822, at a concert at the "Landständischer Saal," was a great success. He was greeted in Austrian and Hungarian aristocratic circles and also met Beethoven and Schubert. In spring 1823, when the one year's leave of absence came to an end, Adam Liszt asked Prince Esterházy in vain for two more years. Adam Liszt therefore took his leave of the Prince's services. At the end of April 1823, the family for the last time returned to Hungary. At end of May 1823, the family went to Vienna again.
Towards the end of 1823 or early 1824 Liszt's first published composition appeared in print, a Variation on a Waltz by Diabelli (now S. 147), which was Variation 24 in Part II of Vaterländischer Künstlerverein. This anthology, commissioned by Diabelli, included 50 variations on his waltz by 50 different composers (Part II), Part I being taken up by Beethoven's 33 variations on the same theme, which are now better known as the Diabelli Variations, Op. 120.
Liszt was a prolific composer. His composition career has a clear arch that follows his changing professional and personal life.[citation needed] Liszt is best known for his piano music, but he wrote extensively for many media. Because of his background as a forefront technical piano virtuoso, Liszt's piano works are often marked by their difficulty. Liszt is very well known as a programmatic composer, or an individual who bases his compositional ideas in extra-musical things such as a poetry or painting. Liszt is credited with the creation of the Symphonic Poem which is a programmatic orchestral work that generally consists of a single movement.
Liszt's compositional style delved deeply into issues of unity both within and across movements. For this reason, in his most famous and virtuosic works, he is an archetypal Romantic composer. Liszt pioneered the technique of thematic transformation, a method of development which was related to both the existing variation technique and to the new use of the Leitmotif by Richard Wagner.
The largest and best-known portion of Liszt's music is his original piano work. His thoroughly revised masterwork, "Années de pèlerinage" ("Years of Pilgrimage") includes arguably his most provocative and stirring pieces. This set of three suites ranges from the virtuosity of the Suisse Orage (Storm) to the subtle and imaginative visualizations of artworks by Michelangelo and Raphael in the second set. Années contains some pieces which are loose transcriptions of Liszt's own earlier compositions; the first "year" recreates his early pieces of "Album d'un voyageur", while the second book includes a resetting of his own song transcriptions once separately published as "Tre sonetti di Petrarca" ("Three sonnets of Petrarch"). The relative obscurity of the vast majority of his works may be explained by the immense number of pieces he composed, and the level of technical difficulty which was present in much of his composition.
Liszt's piano works are usually divided into two classes. On the one hand, there are "original works", and on the other hand "transcriptions", "paraphrases" or "fantasies" on works by other composers. Examples for the first class are works such as the piece Harmonies poétiques et religieuses of May 1833 and the Piano Sonata in B minor (1853). Liszt's transcriptions of Schubert songs, his fantasies on operatic melodies, and his piano arrangements of symphonies by Berlioz and Beethoven are examples for the second class. As special case, Liszt also made piano arrangements of his own instrumental and vocal works. Examples of this kind are the arrangement of the second movement "Gretchen" of his Faust Symphony and the first "Mephisto Waltz" as well as the "Liebesträume No. 3" and the two volumes of his "Buch der Lieder".
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