![]() He was a child prodigy and a virtuoso pianist. Liszt was born sixteen years before Beethoven’s death. This brings us to Franz Liszt (1811-1886). These changes transformed a delicate instrument into an incredibly powerful beast that can replace an orchestra but that at the same time retains the gentleness of its ancestors. The biggest differences between the pianoforte and fortepiano (the modern piano) are, first, that the frame the harp strings are tied to is not wooden but metal the low-tension strings have been replaced with high-tension ones the instrument has a range of two additional octaves (14 extra white keys) and the hammers are covered with tightly compacted felt instead of leather. He complained to the piano manufacturer that pianos wore out very fast. At one point he had broken 78% of the strings in his piano. Beethoven was one of the early adopters and beneficiaries of the piano’s evolution and played an important role in the evolution of the instrument. This transformation had a major impact on the music that was composed and, in a musical feedback loop, composers impacted the instrument. But from the late 1700s to the early 1800s the piano underwent a significant transformation. Mozart died in 1791, just as the fortepiano (or simply, piano), the instrument we are all familiar with, was starting to emerge. Think of Mozart’s piano concertos or sonatas, which were written for pianoforte. Each note is very clear and distinct, and the pianoforte has still not completely lost the sound of the harpsichord. The sound of the pianoforte is different from the sound we accustomed to hearing today: it is lighter, and the instrument did not have a double escape mechanism and thus could not repeat sounds rapidly – it speaks instead of signing. This is the instrument used by Mozart and the young Beethoven. The frame that held the strings was still wooden, and the strings were held at low tension. In fact it was called a harpsichord – think of it as a harp (wooden frame with stretched strings) with a keyboard.Īround 1700 the harpsichord gradually transformed into a pianoforte, which had the same look as the harpsichord, but instead of the strings being plucked they were hit by little leather-wrapped hammers. Though the earlier instrument had a similar shape and had a keyboard, its interior plumbing was completely different. The piano you see today in concerts hall or in private homes was not always like that. I don’t think you can talk about Liszt without talking first about the evolution of the piano. Legend has it that Beethoven kissed Liszt on the brow after the young boy played him his Archduke Piano Trio from memory with the missing violin and cello parts incorporated as he went along.Listen on: iTunes | Google Podcasts | Onlineįranz Liszt was a Hungarian composer and pianist. July 1886 he died from dropsy complicated by pneumonia. The rest of his life was dominated by a series of inspired sacred compositions, while his piano music became more calmly reflective and meditative in tone.Īctive to the end, even in 1886 (the year of his death) Liszt was on a tour which embraced his first visit to London in more than 40 years. Such was his devotion to the church that Pope Pius IX conferred on him the title of ‘Abbé’ four years later. In 1848, Liszt accepted a full-time professional post in Weimar where he increasingly turned his attention towards composing. He started every performance by ceremoniously removing a pair of white gloves and he invariably employed a second piano on stage so that onlookers could admire his prowess from every conceivable angle. Some particularly horrific scenes during the Paris cholera epidemic of 1832 so moved him that he once spent all night thrashing out the Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) chant on the piano.īetween 18 Liszt gave well over a thousand concerts throughout most of western Europe, Turkey, Poland and Russia, stunning audiences wherever he went with his blend of pianistic devilry and showbiz razzmatazz. Liszt developed a morbid obsession with death in the 1830s. Liszt’s early progress was so astounding that by the age of nine he had already mastered Ferdinand Ries’s excruciatingly difficult E flat major Piano Concerto. Liszt’s output for solo piano was prodigious, centered on a core of more than 100 original titles, many of which subdivide into sets of half-a-dozen pieces or more. His compositions inspired a whole generation of keyboard virtuosi. Franz Liszt (1811–1886) was one of the most important composers of the Romantic period.
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