Liszt: Complete Piano Music Vol 26: Music for two pianos

"The Naxos recording made at the Italian Cultural Institute in Budapest has an exceptional combination of clarity and balance. The booklet notes from Keith Anderson provide most of the essential information. The duo demonstrate that they can handle the severe technical demands with aplomb and at the same time create a convincing sense of drama. They clearly have the music of Liszt in the blood."
(MusicWeb Jan 2007)

Born at Raiding, in Hungary, in 1811, the son of Adam Liszt, a steward in the service of Haydn's former patrons, the Esterházy Princes, Franz Liszt had early encouragement from members of the Hungarian nobility, allowing him in 1822 to go to Vienna, for lessons with Czerny and a famous meeting with Beethoven. From there he moved to Paris, where Cherubini refused him admission to the Conservatoire, as a foreigner. Nevertheless he was able to impress audiences by his performance, now supported by the Erard family, piano manufacturers whose wares he was able to advertise in the concert tours on which he embarked. In 1827 Adam Liszt died, and Franz Liszt was now joined again by his mother in Paris, while using his time to teach, to read and benefit from the intellectual society with which he came into contact. His interest in virtuoso performance was renewed when he heard the great violinist Paganini, whose technical accomplishments he now set out to emulate.

The years that followed brought a series of compositions, including transcriptions of songs and operatic fantasies, part of the stock-in-trade of a virtuoso. Liszt's relationship with a married woman, the Comtesse Marie d'Agoult, led to his departure from Paris for years of travel abroad, first to Switzerland, then back to Paris, before leaving for Italy, Vienna and Hungary. By 1844 his relationship with his mistress, the mother of his three children, was at an end, but his concert activities continued until 1847, the year in which his association began with Carolyne zu Sayn-Wittgenstein, a Polish heiress, the estranged wife of a Russian prince. The following year he settled with her in Weimar, the city of Goethe, turning his attention now to the development of a newer form of orchestral music, the symphonic poem, and, as always, to the revision and publication of earlier compositions.

It was in 1861, at the age of fifty, that Liszt moved to Rome, following Princess Carolyne, who had settled there a year earlier. Divorce and annulment seemed to have opened the way to their marriage, but they now continued to live in separate apartments in the city. Liszt eventually took minor orders and developed a pattern of life that divided his time between Weimar, where he imparted advice to a younger generation, Rome, where he was able to pursue his religious interests, and Pest, where he returned now as a national hero. He died in 1886 in Bayreuth, where his daughter Cosima, widow of Richard Wagner, lived, more concerned with the continued propagation of her husband's music.

Liszt had lacked formal education, but in Paris was able to make up for any deficiency in this respect by his own wide reading and by association with leading writers and artists of the time. His elopement with Marie d'Agoult in 1835 had first taken the couple to Switzerland, where their daughter Blandine was born. A period back in Paris was followed in 1837 by further travel, now to Italy, where a second daughter, Cosima, was born on Christmas Eve. A later biographer painted an idyllic picture of a period that in fact brought practical difficulties and discomforts, with the romantic suggestion that Liszt and his mistress read Dante together by the side of a statue of Dante and Beatrice. Marie d'Agoult later saw herself in the latter rôle, an identification that Liszt could, later, at least, only greet with scepticism. Nevertheless the months spent in Italy did provide the occasion for reading Petrarch and Dante, the latter, to whom Liszt was said to have a resemblance in profile, familiar enough to him from his Paris days.