Franz (Ferenc) Liszt (Doborján [now Raiding, Austria], October 22, 1811 – Bayreuth, July 31, 1886), celebrated concert pianist, composer and conductor, originator of the symphonic poem genre.

He began to play the piano at the age of six (taught by his father); his skills developed so fast that when at the age of nine at a public concert in Sopron he played the difficult E flat major piano concerto by Ries with notable artistic success, his father made plans for a concert in Pozsony as well. As a result of the latter performance a group of Hungarian magnates offered a scholarship of 600 forints a year for six years to finance Liszt’s musical education. This was gratefully accepted, and in 1822 the family moved to Vienna. For 18 months Liszt took piano lessons from Czerny and studied music theory with Salieri; both teachers gave him an introduction to composition. Czerny may also have introduced him to Beethoven.

Liszt’s public performances in Vienna in 1822–23 were so successful that his father decided to embark on a tour of western Europe with his son and then to enrol him in the Paris Conservatoire. On the way to the French capital Liszt performed in Munich and Stuttgart, among other places, and his audiences hailed him as the reincarnation of Mozart. Because of his foreign origin, however, he was unable to gain admission to the Conservatoire. From then on, Liszt took no more piano lessons, but as an autodidact developed his own talent. For a short time, he studied composition with Paër and Reicha, and wrote a little one-act opera entitled Don Sanche, ou le Château d’Amour, which was performed five times in 1825 at the Académie Royale de Musique.

Liszt continued to tour until his father’s death in August 1827, then settled in Paris, where he supported himself and his mother by teaching. He was jolted out of his seclusion by the July revolution of 1830. He moved in the highest literary and artistic circles; he was influenced by the works of Chateaubriand, Lamartine and Victor Hugo, the music of Chopin and Berlioz, and the socialist views of the Saint-Simonists and the Abbé Lamennais; he felt a vocation for the priesthood, but finally chose music. The brilliant violin playing of Paganini aroused in him a desire for instrumental virtuosity and a dramatic performing style, and Berlioz reinforced his musical aspirations.

With his first mistress, Countess Marie d’Agoult (who became known as a writer under the pen-name Daniel Stern), he travelled in Switzerland in 1835–36 and in Italy in 1837–39. They had three children: Blandine, Daniel and then Cosima, who was later to become Richard Wagner's wife. In 1939 Liszt offered to give concerts in order to raise the missing amount required to erect the planned statue of Beethoven in Bonn. In the course of the ensuing concert tours, he conquered Europe. In 1847 he met Princess Carolyne von Sayn-Wittgenstein, who became his second mistress. It was partly owing to Carolyne that Liszt gave up his career as a performer and in 1848 settled in Weimar, where he accepted the position of court conductor. As Goethe had once done, he made Weimar the cultural capital of Germany, and a centre of modern music.

He unselfishly supported his gifted contemporaries; as a conductor he did a great deal to promote appreciation of the works of Wagner and Berlioz, and as a teacher he honed the skills of the younger generation of pianists, including Hans von Bülow and Tausig (and later, István Thoman and Árpád Szendy). As a composer, in his Weimar years he produced his most influential works, including his Hungarian rhapsodies Nos. 1–15, volumes 1 and 2 of the Years of Pilgrimage, his B minor sonata, the 12 symphonic poems, the Faust and Dante symphonies, the Esztergom Mass, the two piano concertos and the Totentanz.

Having left Weimar, from 1860 to 1869 he lived in Rome, where in 1865 he took minor orders. In the 1860s and 1870s he composed the Christus oratorio, the Coronation Mass, the Via Crucis and several smaller religious works. Every year from 1869 until his death he travelled to Budapest and to Weimar for several months. In 1875 he was appointed president and professor at the newly established Academy of Music in Budapest. In the official apartment he was given in that institution’s first independent building (today the Old Academy, the Ferenc Liszt Memorial Museum), every winter Liszt gave piano master courses. In the summer of 1886, although he was ill, he travelled to the Wagner festival and there, in Bayreuth, he met his death.