Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt was raised at Raiding in western Hungary and schooled in Vienna and Paris. He spent the 1830s and 1840s touring as a pianist, then stopped at thirty-five and never played for a fee again. The Transcendental Études, the Hungarian Rhapsodies, the Années de pèlerinage and the Sonata in B minor are among his piano works. At Weimar as Kapellmeister he programmed Wagner, Berlioz and Schumann, and there he composed symphonic poems including Les Préludes, Tasso and Mazeppa, as well as the Faust and Dante symphonies. He taught for nothing in Rome, Weimar and Budapest. The last pieces — Nuages gris, La lugubre gondola, the Bagatelle without tonality — date from his final years. He died at Bayreuth in 1886. In Rome he entered the clergy, receiving the four minor orders and becoming known as Abbé Liszt, and in 1875 he set in motion the founding of the conservatoire in Budapest, becoming its first president and one of its professors.