Liszt Shows His Unselfishness
After Liszt’s father died in 1827, he gave up concert tours for a while, and settled down with his mother for eight restful years to study and teach the piano. Liszt generously gave his mother all the money he had made in his successful tours because, he said, she had made so many sacrifices for him. At this time he grew spiritually deeper and well fitted for the glories to come. Like Berlioz, Liszt was born a short time after the French Revolution, when new ideas were coming into literature, religion and art, through which this young and gifted artist tried to guide himself in a wholesome way that shaped his future life.
Liszt again made concert tours through Europe (1839), and astounded everyone with his playing and the charm of his personality. Musicians and audiences were at his feet! He made a great deal of money, too, and grew so popular that artists painted him, ladies knelt before him in adoration, tableaux were given in his honor, monuments erected to him and societies named after him.
His kindness to the poor and needy was unfailing. When Pesth was inundated by a flood, he sent a generous gift to the sufferers; he established a fund for the poor in Raiding and completed the necessary sum for the Beethoven monument at Bonn. He never accepted money for teaching after he was “grown up” for he wanted to be a help to his some three hundred pupils. It is said that after 1847 he never gave a concert for his own benefit! An extraordinary character!
In 1843, he went to Weimar, as a visiting artist. Soon he met Princess Von Sayn Wittgenstein of Russia who realized his great gifts and influenced him to become more than a pianist. Later in the year we see him as Choir Master living at Weimar and attracting the greatest people of the musical world to him. Here Liszt was able to help young musicians who came from all over the world. Wagner would never have been so successful, had not Liszt aided him during his exile. He stood by him with patience and loving kindness and helped him to produce his operas. He was of untold assistance to Schumann and Berlioz, Rubinstein, Cornelius and countless others by performing their works when nobody else dared to. Liszt was in high favor with society, and having a love for the new in music, he used his popularity to help music grow. Wagner himself said: “At the end of my last stay in Paris, when ill, broken down and despairing, I sat brooding over my fate, my eye fell on the score of my Lohengrin, totally forgotten by me. Suddenly I felt something like compassion that this music should never sound from off the death-pale paper. I wrote two lines to Liszt; his answer was the news that preparations for the performance were being made on the largest scale the limited means of Weimar would permit.” Liszt’s motto was, “First Place to the Living.”
Liszt’s Professional Life
Liszt’s services were demanded for concerts and festivals in many towns from 1852–1859. The people, however, could not understand how their idol could believe in Wagner and Berlioz, and there were many rabid discussions. Very soon Liszt brought out his own symphonic poems, Tasso, Prometheus, Mazeppa, Les Preludes, and his two piano concertos (1855–1857), utilizing his romantic ideas.
After leaving Weimar, which some biographers claim was because of the adverse criticism of Cornelius’ opera, The Barber of Bagdad, Liszt went to Rome. Here his deep mystical nature and his need for rest and time for contemplation, led him to enter one of the Holy Orders of the Church, and the Pope gave him the honorary title of Abbé. Pope Pius IX adored him and called him his Palestrina. The church music which he composed there included his oratorios St. Elizabeth, The Christus, his unfinished Stanislaus, the Hungarian Coronation Mass and the Requiem.
Liszt returned to Weimar every spring and summer and conducted many festivals and concerts, including the Beethoven centenary. He was also much interested in the National Academy at Pesth, so now he divided his time between Rome, Pesth, and Weimar.
He wrote many brilliant piano pieces, among them his nineteen remarkable Hungarian Rhapsodies based on the melodies he heard from the gypsies. Besides composing music, teaching and helping other musicians and giving to the needy, he wrote essays and criticisms.