The Rockstar That Made the Ladies Faint

Franz Liszt was a rockstar. He found incredibly unique ways to achieve the maximum effect out of the piano of his day. From very early on he was a successful pianist and soon reached the epitome of artistic success in Europe. Many other musicians, such as Clara Schumann, frowned upon his style. His Father had been his first music teacher before he went to study under Czerny. He travelled widely around Europe and was heavily influenced by the places, people, and things that he saw along his way, and often documented them in written or musical journals (such as the Years of the Pilgramage). Pianistically, his music treats the piano more like an orchestra than anything else. He had an incredibly gifted talent for transcribing things for the piano and often did that with many other compositions. He was a missionary for music while making it his own at the same time. He developed new ways for the tremolo affect, more coloristic and chromatic uses of harmony, parallel diminished seven chords, tritones, parallel fourths, slow moving melodies with lots of figurations, cadential figures, receisative sections, repeated throbbing chords, and many other things along his compositional journey. There is so much to talk about in his music that one could not even begin to cover any part of it in a small blog entry, but suffice to say he was the greatest pianist in Europe, a rockstar, and one of the most gifted and famous artists in history.