Alongside Wagner, Liszt was one of the most prominent representatives of the New German School, a progressive group of composers involved in the "War of the Romantics" who developed ideas of programmatic music and harmonic experimentation.

[5][n 2] Liszt's father was a land steward in the service of Prince Nikolaus II Esterházy;[5] a keen amateur musician, he played the piano, cello, guitar and flute,[6][7] and knew Haydn and Hummel personally.

Paer was involved in the Parisian theatrical and operatic scene, and through his connections Liszt staged his only opera, Don Sanche, which premiered shortly before his fourteenth birthday.

He stopped playing the piano and giving lessons, and developed an intense interest in religion, having many conversations with Abbé de Lamennais and Chrétien Urhan, a German-born violinist who introduced him to the Saint-Simonists.

Much of Urhan's emotive music which moved beyond the Classical paradigm, such as Elle et moi, La Salvation angélique and Les Regrets, may have helped to develop Liszt's taste and style.

He composed practically nothing in the years between his father's death and the July Revolution of 1830, which inspired him to sketch a symphony based on the events of the "three glorious days" (this piece was left unfinished, and later reworked as Héroïde funèbre).

[35] The process of Liszt completely redeveloping his technique is often described as a direct result of attending Paganini's concert, but it is likely that he had already begun this work previously, during the period 1828–1832.

Critic Jules Janin's report in Journal des débats asserted that there was no clear winner: "Two victors and no vanquished; it is fitting to say with the poet 'et adhuc sub judice lis est".

[48] In a fashion that has been described as similar to "the mass hysteria associated with revivalist meetings or 20th-century rock stars", women fought over his cigar stubs and coffee dregs,[49] and his silk handkerchiefs and velvet gloves, which they ripped to shreds as souvenirs.

[50] This atmosphere was fuelled in great part by the artist's mesmeric personality and stage presence: he was regarded as handsome,[51][52] and Heine wrote of his showmanship during concerts: "How powerful, how shattering was his mere physical appearance".

[56] After a tour of Turkey and Russia that summer,[57] Liszt gave the final paid concert of his career at Elizabetgrad in September,[58] then spent the winter with the princess at her estate in Woronińce.

He acted as the official court kapellmeister at the expense of Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna of Russia until 1859,[61] jointly with Hippolyte André Jean Baptiste Chélard until his retirement in 1852.

[62] During this period Liszt acted as conductor at court concerts and on special occasions at the theatre, arranged several festivals celebrating the work of Berlioz and Wagner, and produced the premiere of Lohengrin.

She wished eventually to marry Liszt, but since her husband, Russian military officer Prince Nicholas von Sayn-Wittgenstein, was still alive, she had to convince the Roman Catholic authorities that her marriage to him had been invalid.

[69] In 1859 Franz Brendel coined the name "New German School" in his publication Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, to refer to the musicians associated with Liszt while he was in Weimar.

The School was a loose confederation of progressive composers, mainly grouped together as a challenge to supposed conservatives such as Mendelssohn and Brahms, and so the term is considered to be of limited use in describing a particular movement or set of unified principles.

[77] On 11 September 1862 his 26-year-old daughter Blandine also died, having contracted sepsis after surgery on a breast growth which developed shortly after giving birth to a son she named in memory of Daniel.

On the topic, Liszt commented to Chopin's biographer Frederick Niecks that Marie d'Agoult and George Sand had frequently disagreed, and the musicians had felt obliged to side with their respective partners.

[52][134] His popularity during the "Lisztomania" period of the 1840s was unrivalled, and the critic Peter G. Davis has written that "Perhaps [Liszt] was not the most transcendent virtuoso who ever lived, but his audiences thought he was, and no pianist since has seriously challenged the legend.

Now I no longer divorce a composition from the era in which it was written, and any claim to embellish or modernize the works of earlier periods seems just as absurd for a musician to make as it would be for an architect, for example, to place a Corinthian capital on the columns of an Egyptian temple.

Musicologist Kenneth Hamilton identifies several themes which occurred through Liszt's teachings, including avoiding excessive sentimentality, imagining the orchestration of the piece, flexibility of tempo, and the importance of a sense of music.

[150] The increasing prominence of the solo piano virtuoso in the 1830s led to other acts on the bill being described as "assistant artists", with Liszt declaring his pre-eminence in a letter to a friend dated June 1839: "Le concert, c'est moi".

[173] In addition to piano transcriptions, Liszt also transcribed about a dozen works for organ, such as Otto Nicolai's Ecclesiastical Festival Overture on the chorale "Ein feste Burg", Orlando di Lasso's motet Regina coeli and excerpts of Bach's Cantata No.

[189] Liszt's final period is considered to have started from about 1869,[190] during which he wrote a number of short and independent works, such as the collection Weihnachtsbaum and a piano version of Via crucis, although he did continue to write transcriptions and paraphrases as well as sacred vocal music.

[191][192] Studies of his output from this period typically focus on pieces which display a willingness to push the boundaries of tonality and have an association with death and mourning, such as La lugubre gondola and Unstern!.

[196] Additional examples include Czardas macabre, which repeatedly uses a single melodic motif and rhythm accompanied dissonantly or with open fifths, and "Csárdás obstinée", which makes extensive use of false relations.

Indeed, one is hard-pressed to think of an innovative composer of the early twentieth century who was not influenced by Liszt's music, especially in its departures from traditional harmonies and novel approaches to form and formal unity".

[224] Liszt's method of using Hungarian folk music in his compositions was developed further by these composers and their successors, who integrated such themes more subtly and valued the authenticity of the source material to a greater extent.

[224] It is now held that many of Liszt's late compositions, such as Nuages gris, Les jeux d'eaux à la villa d'Este and Czardas macabre, anticipated future developments.

In later years some in Weimar would criticise the masterclasses as a vanity club more interested in praising Liszt than in learning pianistic excellence, although Carl Lachmund commented that the success of many of its pupils, such as Arthur Friedheim, Moriz Rosenthal, Frederic Lamond and Alexander Siloti, proved the groups' effectiveness.