![]() ![]() “When you play Liszt's notes on the keyboard, your hands get to trace the outlines of the shapes his hands created. “He was possibly the greatest pianist that has ever lived,” Gerstein agrees: “a composer of revolutionary works that exerted pivotal influence on those that followed – also a great teacher, humanist and possibly the nicest of the great musicians.” Is he conscious of the spirit of Liszt when he plays the music? “It’s a bit like viewing the peak of Everest – out of reach, yet inspiring,” Gerstein admits. Was Liszt unique, then? “The word could have been invented to describe Franz Liszt,” maintains Hilmes. Composers ever since have used these, or elaborated on the seeds of keyboard ideas that he planted in his works.” As a composer and orchestrator, too, he was a revolutionary, writing pioneering works that opened up whole new worlds of expression.” The leading contemporary pianist Kirill Gerstein, who has recently recorded Liszt’s fiendishly difficult Transcendental Etudes, points out that between 18, he invented “pretty much every possible pianistic device that appears in modern piano writing. “He was the first to perform the whole of the known keyboard repertory from Bach to his contemporary Chopin,” explains Hilmes, “and he did so, moreover, from memory. You might call that charisma, presence, the ‘X-factor', or you might be a little more cynical and call it a well-crafted image with fantastic PR and marketing.”īut Liszt, living and working over a century before mass communication, was indubitably the real deal. It's not necessarily predictable: you can throw a lot of money and publicity at an artist and not receive a great return on your investment if there isn't something there to catch the public imagination. “Talent, yes, but also looks, charisma, branding, catchy tunes, marketing: these all play a part. “There are so many factors at play,” she says. There is, however, a critical difference between Liszt’s time and the era of Beatlemania and beyond, and that is the ever more sophisticated ‘PR machine’ behind the artists (although Liszt was clearly no slouch when it came to self-publicity.) Deller points out that, these days, when it comes to creating a superstar, talent may be just a small part of the equation. (According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word was first used in the way we use it now in the 1830s, as Liszt rose to fame.) The ultimate classical superstar – even more so than his musical hero, the violin virtuoso Niccolò Paganini – this legendary composer, pianist and pedagogue unleashed what his biographer Dr Oliver Hilmes describes as “a highly infectious strain of Lisztomania that gripped Europe for years at a time”. ![]() ![]() And surprisingly, it has its roots not in post-war popular recorded music, but in the classical concert halls of 19th -Century Europe, where an outrageously talented young Hungarian named Franz Liszt overcame a very poor background to become a bona fide ‘celebrity’. You might think it first emerged in the 1950s and ‘60s with Elvis and Beatlemania, and was given a new lease of life in our own age where One Directioners and Beliebers battle it out to prove they are the most loyal pop fans on the planet. The spectacle of young women shrieking, sobbing, and swooning at the sight of their musical idols might seem like a peculiarly modern phenomenon. ![]()
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