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Franz Liszt (1811 –1886) was a Hungarian virtuoso pianist and composer of the Romantic period. He was a renowned performer throughout Europe during the 19th century, noted especially for his showmanship and great skill with the piano. Today, he is considered to be one of the greatest pianists in history, despite the fact that no recordings of his playing exist. Liszt is frequently credited with re-defining piano playing itself, and his influence is still visible today, both through his compositions and his legacy as a teacher. He also contributed greatly towards the Romantic idiom in general, and he is credited with the creation of the symphonic poem.

Liszt studied and played at Vienna and Paris and for most of his early adulthood toured throughout Europe giving concerts. He is credited with the innovation of the modern piano recital, in which his virtuosity won him approval by composers and performers alike. His great generosity with both time and money benefited many people: victims of disasters, orphans, and the many students he taught for free. He also contributed to the Beethoven memorial fund.

Many of his piano compositions have entered the standard repertoire, including the Hungarian Rhapsodies, Transcendental Etudes (Études d'exécution transcendante), Années de Pèlerinage (Years of Pilgrimage), the Piano Sonata in B minor, and two piano concertos. He also made many piano transcriptions of operas, famous symphonies, Paganini Caprices (some of the most demanding works of the violin repertoire), and Schubert lieder. Many of his piano compositions are among the most technically challenging in the repertoire. Liszt was himself a composer of lieder and choral music, of symphonic poems and other orchestral works. His compositions for organ are lauded and well-established in the organ repertoire.

Liszt was a prolific composer. Most of his music is for the piano and much of it requires formidable technique, although in his later years his compositional style became less overtly virtuosic and more harmonically experimental. (A famous example of this later style is Nuages Gris, it can also be seen to some extent in the third volume of the Années de Pèlerinage.)

In his most famous and virtuosic works, he is the 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. In the 1840s and 1850s he invented the symphonic poem, which is a single-movement orchestral work usually based on a literary work or a character sketch. Liszt's inspiration came from classical literature, including "Ce qu'on entend sur la montagne," based on a Victor Hugo poem of the same title, and "Les preludes" from Lamartine. Other pieces are based on works by Lord Byron, Goethe and Dante. Liszt's symphonic poems represent his ideal and philosophy of "The Music of the Future", in which music and art and literature would all join together in a grand synthesis. Although the symphonic poems were generally successes, they were often criticised by those who preferred the traditional absolute music as exemplified by Johannes Brahms.

His transcriptions met with less criticism. As a transcriber of even the most unlikely and complicated orchestral works, he created piano arrangements which stood on their own merits; many other pianist-composers followed his example.

His piano works have always been well represented in concert programs and recordings by pianists throughout the world. Many of his works have been recorded a multitude of times. However, the only pianist who has recorded his entire pianistic oeuvre is the Australian Leslie Howard. The project took almost 15 years to complete, and comprised 95 full-length CDs. Howard was awarded a place in the Guinness Book of Records for having completed the largest recording project ever in the history of music (including both pop and classical). The series has also earned several Gramophone Grands Prix du Disque, and a special award from the Hungarian government. This massive undertaking included a number of premiere recordings, including many unpublished pieces, recorded from manuscript, which had not been played by anyone since Liszt himself.

Later works of the composer such as Bagatelle sans tonalité ("Bagatelle without Tonality") foreshadow composers who would further explore the modern concept of atonality. His thoroughly revised masterwork, Années de Pèlerinage ("Years of Pilgrimage"), arguably includes his most provocative and stirring pieces. This set of three suites ranges from the pure virtuosity of the Suisse Orage (Storm) to the subtle and imaginative visualizations of artworks by Michaelangelo 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.

Liszt helped found the Liszt School of Music Weimar as well as the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest. Throughout his later years Liszt took on many private students and his influence as a pedagogue was immense. Among his students were Eugen d'Albert, Arthur Friedheim, Sophie Menter, Moriz Rosenthal, Emil von Sauer, and Alexander Siloti.

Liszt's playing was described as theatrical and showy, and all those who saw him perform were stunned at his unrivalled mastery over the keyboard. Perhaps the best indication of Liszt's piano-playing abilities comes from his Douze Grandes Etudes and Paganini Studies, written in 1837 and 1838 respecively, and described by Schumann as "studies in storm and dread designed to be performed by, at most, ten or twelve players in the world". To play these pieces, a pianist must connect with the piano as an extension of his own body (Walker, 1987).

Liszt claimed to have spent ten or twelve hours each day practising scales, arpeggios, trills and repeated notes to improve his technique and endurance. All of these piano techniques were frequently applied in his compositions, often resulting in music of extreme technical difficulty (his Transcendental Etude No.5 "Feux follets" is an example). He would challenge himself and his immaculate fingering by presenting random problems to his playing.

During the 1830s and 1840s — the years of Liszt's "transcendental execution" — he revolutionised piano technique in almost every sector. Figures like Rubinstein, Paderewski and Rachmaninoff turned to Liszt's music to discover the laws which govern the keyboard.

While revolutionary and famously spectacular, Liszt's playing was far from mere flash and acrobatics. He also was reported to have played with a depth and nobility of feeling that would move sturdy men to tears. It seems that this quality to his playing may have continued to develop during his life, overtaking the youthful fire and bravura. Indeed, reports of his playing in old age include observations that it was surprisingly and distinctly subtle and poetic, with great purity of tone and effortlessness of execution; in distinction to the more tumultuous "Liszt school" of playing, which by then had already started to become traditional in Europe. Examination of the late piano works seems to back up this expressive requirement, where the composer seems to be deliberately rejecting the showiness of his earlier works.

Liszt was also a brilliant sight reader and stunned Edvard Grieg in the 1870s by playing his A Minor Piano Concerto perfectly by sight. Decades earlier Liszt had played Chopin's studies at sight, prompting Chopin to write that he was consumed by jealousy, and wished to steal from Liszt his manner of playing his own pieces. This is all the more remarkable when one remembers that Liszt was playing at sight from a hand-written manuscript.

The term "recital" was first used by Liszt at his concert in London of June 9, 1840, although the term had been suggested to him by the publisher Frederick Beale, and his career model is still followed by performing artists to this day. Before Liszt no one had given a piano-only concert. There would always have been a chamber work, or some songs too. It was Liszt who elevated the piano to its status today, and who demonstrated that a satisfying concert can be given by the piano alone. To this day there is no other instrument for which this can be said.

Liszt's recitals traversed the European continent from the Urals to Ireland. He would often play before as many as three thousand people. He was the first solo pianist to play entire programmes from memory, and the first to play with the piano at right angles to the platform, with its lid open, reflecting sound across the auditorium.

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