Liszt S Kiss

Enamored of the celebrated composer and pianist Franz Liszt during a concert, young pianist Anne secures an introduction in spite of her recently widowed father's objections and finds herself swept up by a shocking family secret that her father will go any length to protect. By the author of Emilie's Voice. Original. 25,000 first printing.

Franz Liszt: A Research and Information Guide is an annotated bibliography concerning both the nature of primary sources related to the composer and the scope and significance of the secondary sources which deal with him, his compositions, and his influence as a composer and performer. The second edition includes research published since the publication of the first edition and provide electronic resources. Franz Liszt was born on 22 October 1811 at Raiding, today located in Austria’s Burgenland. He received his first piano lessons from his father, Adam Liszt, an employee of the celebrated Eszterházy family. Young Franz was quickly acclaimed a prodigy, and in 1820 a group of Hungarian magnates offered to underwrite his musical education. Shortly thereafter the Liszts moved to Vienna, where Franz studied piano and composition with Carl Czerny and Anton Salieri. Performances there earned Liszt local fame; even Beethoven expressed interest in him.

The third volume in Alan Walker's magisterial biography of Franz Liszt. "You can't help but keep turning the pages, wondering how it will all turn out: and Walker's accumulated readings of Liszt's music have to be taken seriously indeed."--D. Kern Holoman, New York Review of Books "A conscientious scholar passionate about his subject. Mr. Walker makes the man and his age come to life. These three volumes will be the definitive work to which all subsequent Liszt biographies will aspire."--Harold C. Schonberg, Wall Street Journal "What distinguishes Walker from Liszt's dozens of earlier biographers is that he is equally strong on the music and the life. A formidable musicologist with a lively polemical style, he discusses the composer's works with greater understanding and clarity than any previous biographer. And whereas many have recycled the same erroneous, often damaging information, Walker has relied on his own prodigious, globe-trotting research, a project spanning twenty-five years. The result is a textured portrait of Liszt and his times without rival."--Elliot Ravetz, Time "The prose is so lively that the reader is often swept along by the narrative.... This three-part work... is now the definitive work on Liszt in English and belongs in all music collections."--Library Journal

Musical biography has rarely been an object of theoretical and methodological reflection. Our present-day perception of the lives of prominent composers and performers of the past has been largely formed by cultural and political assumptions of nineteenth-century biographers and their twentieth-century followers. While older biographies are being scrutinized for veracity and 'updated' with new evidence, their historiographical premisses and narrative techniques remain largely unchallenged. The epistemological upheavals in the humanities since the 1960s have generated a body of theoretical thought that has undermined many of the assumptions of traditional biography. Consequently, many of these assumptions have lost their hold as viable underpinnings for present-day scholarly biography. For example, the accumulation of facts is no longer believed to bring us closer to an understanding of the subject; nor are the traditional views of the unified self and the self as a foundational idea taken for granted. This volume brings together musicologists and historians who explore, through individual case studies, the rich potential of these new theories for writing musical lives. The authors of this volume examine how the insights provided by these theories illuminate our critical reassessment of older biographies - and the interpretations of musical works these biographies were used to construe - and help forge new approaches to musical biography. The authors also explore the functions musical biographies served in different historical contexts, the relevance of biography for musical criticism, the reliability of archival evidence, the ethics of biography, the demands placed on biography by feminist and gender history, and the new possibilities offered by cinema. The contributors to this volume challenge the view that biography has little importance for music history, analysis, and criticism. Collectively, they reassert biography's centrality and relevance, and dem

The first chapter, on the amateur pianist, scrutinizes the way Andre Gide and Roland Barthes discuss piano playing, their favorite composers - and their homosexuality. Situating these discussions within the histories of sexuality and amateur pianism, the author argues that connections between musical and sexual mastery are shaped by the "performance" of class and gender

Much of Franz Liszt's musical legacy has often been dismissed as 'trivial’ or 'merely showy,' more or less peripheral contributions to nineteenth-century European culture. But Liszt was a mainstream composer in ways most of his critics have failed to acknowledge; he was also an incessant and often extremely successful innovator. Liszt's mastery of fantasy and sonata traditions, his painstaking settings of texts ranging from erotic verse to portions of the Catholic liturgy, and the remarkable self-awareness he demonstrated even in many of his most 'entertaining' pieces: all these things stamp him not only as a master of Romanticism and an early Impressionist, but as a precursor of Postmodern 'pop.' Liszt's Music places Liszt in historical and cultural focus. At the same time, it examines his principal contributions to musical literature -- from his earliest operatic paraphrases to his final explorations of harmonic and formal possibilities. Liszt's compositional methods, including his penchant for revision, problems associated with early editions of some of his works, and certain aspects of class and gender issues are also discussed. The first book-length assessment of Liszt as composer since Humphrey Searle’s 1956 volume, Liszt's Music is illustrated with well over 100 musical examples.

Franz Liszt--child prodigy, virtuoso pianist, co-founder with Chopin and Schumann of the Romantic movement in music--has been the subject of literally hundreds of biographies, but it is only in the last few decades that the importance of Liszt the composer, as opposed to Liszt the Romantic hero, has been recognized. This new perspective has created the need for a fresh, full-scale approach, biographical and critical, to the evaluation of the man and his music. For more than ten years Alan Walker, a leading authority on nineteenth-century music and the author of important studies of Chopin and Schumann, has traveled throughout Europe discovering unpublished material in museums and private collections, in the parish registries of tiny villages in Austria and Hungary, and in major archives in Weimar and Budapest, seeking out new information and corroborating or correcting the old. He has left virtually no source unexamined--from the hundreds of contemporary biographies (many of them more fiction than fact) to the scores of memoirs, reminisces, and diaries of his pupils and disciples (the list of his students from his Weimar masterclasses reads like a Burke's Peerage of pianists). Dr. Walker's efforts have culminated in a study that will stand as definitive for years to come. A feat of impeccable scholarship, it also displays a strong and compelling narrative impulse and a profound understanding of the complicated man Liszt was. In this, the first of three volumes, Dr. Walker examines in greater detail than has ever before been amassed Liszt's family background and his early years. We see "Franzi," a deeply religious and mystical child, whose extraordinary musical gifts lead to studies with the great Carl Czerny in Vienna and propel him into overnight fame in Paris--his youthful opera,Don Sanche, performed when he is fourteen--and in a disorderly and impulsive way of life by the time he is sixteen . . . We see Liszt drifting into obscurity after a nervous breakdown at the age of seventeen, then hearing Paganini for the first time and being so fired by the violinist's amazing technique that he sets for himself a titanic program of work, his aim no less than to create an entirely new repertoire for the piano....We see him, after years if successful touring, returning triumphantly to Hungary, his homeland, and publishing in the same year his "Transcendental" and "Paganini" studies. the signposts of his astonishing technical breakthrough....Finally, we see Liszt at the height of his artistic powers, giving well over a thousand concerts across Europe and Russia during the years 1839-47: "inventing" the modern piano recital, playing entire programs from memory, performing the complete contemporary piano repertoire, breaking down the barriers that had traditionally separated performing artists from their "social superiors," fostering the Romantic view of the artist as superior bring, because divinely gifted . . . until--his colossal career virtually impossible to sustain--he gives his last paid performance at the age of thirty-five . . . Unparalleled in its completeness, its soundness of documentation, and in the quality of its writing, The Virtuoso Years is the first volume of what will unquestionably be the most important biography of Franz Liszt in English or any other language.