Franz Liszt

Franz Liszt was born in Hungary on 22 October 1811 and trained under Carl Czerny and Antonio Salieri, achieving early success as a concert pianist. His European tours in the 1830s and 1840s made him a phenomenon - technical brilliance and looks ignited a craze the press called "Lisztomania," a level of stardom no virtuoso before him had reached. He championed his peers relentlessly, promoting Berlioz, Chopin, Schumann, and Wagner by performing arrangements he called "transcriptions" and "paraphrases" to spread their music. A leader of the New German School, he pushed programmatic music and harmonic risk, taught hundreds of piano students, and invented the masterclass format. Late in life he swerved hard, experimenting with atonality and foreshadowing the next century's upheavals. He died 31 July 1886, leaving the Hungarian Rhapsodies, Transcendental Études, and a Piano Sonata in B minor that still define virtuosity.