Music with Ease > Classical Music Quotes > Franz Liszt Quotes

Share this page:

Le concert, c'est moi.
-- Franz Liszt, writing to the Princess Belgiojoso on his launch of a new kind of public concert: the solo recital; quoted by Alfred Brendel in The New York Review of Books (22 Nov 1990)

When I think of Liszt as a creative artist, he appears before my eyes rouged, on stilts, and blowing into Jericho trumpets fortissimo and pianissimo.
-- Frédéric Chopin, quoted in Walter Beckett, Liszt (1963)

When he sits at the piano and having repeatedly pushed his hair back over his brow, begins to improvise, then he often rages all too madly upon the ivory keys and lets loose a deluge of heaven-storming ideas, with here and there a few sweet flowers to shed fragrance upon the whole. One feels both blessedness and anxiety, but rather more anxiety...
-- Heinrich Heine, quoted in Walter Beckett, Liszt (1963)

With Liszt, one no longer thinks of difficulty overcome; the instrument disappears and music reveals itself.
-- Heinrich Heine, quoted in Walter Beckett, Liszt (1963)

A smasher of pianos.
-- Clara Schumann, quoted in Alan Walker, Robert Schumann: the Man and his Music (1972)

Composition, indeed! Decomposition is the word for such hateful fungi.
-- Dramatic and Musical World of 1855

Liszt's orchestral music is an insult to art. It is gaudy musical harlotry, savage and incoherent bellowings.
-- Boston Gazette

The Liszt's bombast is bad; it is very bad; in fact there is only one thing worse in his music, and that is his affected and false simplicity. It was once said of George Sand (the French author) that she had a habit of speaking and writing of chastity in such terms that the very word became impure; so it is with the simplicity of Liszt.
-- Philip Hale, music critic






Share this page:



Author: David Paul Wagner
(David Paul Wagner on Google+)