He was famous enough that doctors published on "Lisztomania" as a medical condition — audiences fainted, fought over his gloves, and bottled the dregs of his tea to take home.
Liszt was born in 1811 into a German-speaking family in Hungary. He gave his first public concert at nine; at eleven the family moved to Vienna so he could study with Czerny — who had studied with Beethoven, so the line runs straight back.
What changed him was hearing Paganini play in Paris in 1832. He wrote to a friend afterwards: I mean to become the Paganini of the piano. Then he shut himself away to practise, and came out with a technique no contemporary could match.
For the next eight years he crossed Europe, concert after concert. He did two things that were then very strange: he carried the whole evening alone — before him a concert always meant several performers taking turns — and he turned the piano side-on so the audience could see his profile and his hands. That is how the solo recital took its present shape. He coined the word for it himself: recital.
At thirty-five he simply stopped. After a last paid concert in 1847 he moved to Weimar as court music director and spent the rest of his life composing, conducting, and teaching for nothing — he never took a fee from a student in his life.
In old age he took minor orders in the Catholic church and went on composing in a cleric's black cassock. The works of his final years grew extremely thin and extremely dissonant; almost nobody wanted them at the time, and they anticipate music that did not arrive until thirty years after his death.
There is one thing that gives Liszt away at once: the melody is often in the middle. Both hands move above and below it, wrapping the line in the centre — it sounds like three hands, and it is two, interlocking so as to leave the middle line free.
The second mark is the sheer width of the range. He will push a single phrase from the bottom of the keyboard to the top, and push it continuously rather than jumping.
The third is his habit of dropping a completely free run of fast notes between phrases — for those few seconds the beat stops, like a breath taken mid-sentence. Students often stall there, because the score does not say how long it should take.
He is not only display. The late works have very few notes and harmonies that never resolve; they could be by a different man.
