Lisztomania is a 1975 British surreal biographical musical comedy film written and directed by Ken Russell about the 19th-century composer Franz Liszt.

Rick Wakeman, from the progressive rock band Yes, composed the Lisztomania soundtrack, which included synthesiser arrangements of works by Liszt and Richard Wagner.

The term Lisztomania was coined by the German romantic literary figure Heinrich Heine to describe the massive public response to Liszt's virtuosic piano performances.

The film tells of Liszt's life through surrealistic episodes blending fact, fantasy, and anachronistic elements.

Liszt introduces Richard Wagner to his colleagues, including Gioachino Rossini, Hector Berlioz, Frédéric Chopin, and Hans von Bülow.

At the concert, Wagner is put off by Liszt's crowd-pleasing showmanship at the expense of serious musicianship, which includes adding the melody of Chopsticks to his Rienzi variation.

Next, Liszt, in Dresden during the May Uprising, is conflicted about not supporting his friends in the revolt and spending all his time isolated to compose music (it is heavily implied that Marie and his two youngest children have been killed).

The cast featured cameos by actors from director Ken Russell's recurring ensemble, making brief appearances as other well known composers, including: Murray Melvin as Hector Berlioz, Andrew Faulds as Johann Strauss II, Kenneth Colley as Frédéric Chopin (credited as Ken Colley, as in his other Russell works), and Otto Diamant as Felix Mendelssohn.

David Puttnam's company Goodtimes planned to make a series of six films about composers, all to be directed by Ken Russell.

Subjects were to include Franz Liszt, George Gershwin, Berlioz and Vaughan Williams; the first one was Mahler (1974), which had been a minor success.

"[10] In December 1974, Mayfair announced it signed a deal to distribute five films made by Russell and Goodtimes started with one on Liszt.

[17] Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three out of four stars and called it "a berserk exercise of demented genius, and on that level (I want to make my praise explicit) it functions and sometimes even works.

Then it relapses into a noisy bit of pretentiousness in the manner of its predecessor, Tommy full of flashing lights, satin spacesuits, chrome-lucite furniture and mock agony.

"[19] Gene Siskel of the Chicago Tribune gave the film one star out of four and wrote that "Russell fills the screen with enough outlandish sexual imagery to render one's senses numb.

"[20] Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times called it "a buoyant, consistently coherent and imaginative film that is alternately—and sometimes simultaneously—outrageous, hilarious and poignant.

"[21] Gary Arnold of The Washington Post wrote that "it becomes painfully evident that Russell, the Great Vulgarian of contemporary filmmaking, should have quit while he was ahead, sort of.

"[22] Pauline Kael wrote "In a couple of sequences, it erupts successfully with a wholehearted, comic-strip craziness, but for all his lashing himself into a slapstick fury, the director Ken Russell can't seem to pull the elements of film making together.

"[23] In a review for Die Zeit, Hans-Christoph Blumenberg summed up the film as follows: With Russell, who had succeeded in producing an artist portrait of bizarre precision with Mahler, Lisztomania is only a tiring litany of cabaret numbers, which, by means of anachronisms, pseudo-critical analogies, and daring casting choices (for example, Ringo Starr as a pope) gains conviction...In Lisztomania, an exorbitantly vicious berserker drifts in the ruins of his talent, loses himself in an abundance of highly disparate incidents, which nevertheless only end in shrill monotony.