Bard Music Festival: Weekend One

“Franz Liszt and His World.” Orchestral and chamber concerts, preconcert talks, panel discussions, symposium, and special events. Leon Botstein, Christopher H. Gibbs, and Robert Martin, artistic directors. Admission charged.

Art, Spectacle, and the Public

Liszt began his musical career pioneering new feats of keyboard virtuosity. Inspired by hearing Paganini perform in Paris in 1831, he soon became the “Paganini of the Piano”—an inimitable virtuoso whose “transcendent” technique changed the nature of writing for the instrument. His remarkable piano transcriptions and fantasies helped introduce audiences to an extraordinary range of music that was otherwise inaccessible. His Hungarian Rhapsodies inspired future generations of composers to adapt folk and popular music into the concert hall experience.

At mid-century, Liszt abandoned the life of a traveling virtuoso, settled in Weimar, and concentrated on composition, conducting, and teaching. There he spearheaded a progressive artistic movement that supported young and adventurous composers, most notably Berlioz, Wagner, and composers from Russia and Scandinavia. Instituting the first true master classes, he taught nearly all of the greatest pianists of the late 19th century and mentored several composers, without ever taking a fee. Most of his symphonic poems, the Hungarian Rhapsodies, Faust Symphony, and Sonata in B Minor date from this period.

“He who admires art in its technical perfection must respect Liszt. He who is charmed by God-given genius must respect him all the more . . . The Orpheus of our age has let his tones swell through the world metropolis of machinery, and we have found . . . that his fingers are truly railroads and steam engines; his genius even mightier in drawing together the intellectual spirits of the universe than all the railways on earth.” —Hans Christian Andersen, A Poet’s Bazaar