Les Preludes, Mazeppa, Liebestraum No. 3, La Campanella, Les Jeux d'eau a las Villa d'Este, Sonetto 104 del Petrarca, Wilde Jage, Consolation No. 3, Mephisto Waltz

Franz Liszt was the first pianist in history to perform the most difficult pianistic compositons without reading the music. He was also the first pianist to place the piano so that the audience could admire his magnificent profile! And, he was undoubtedly the greatest piano virtuoso ever to perform on that glorious instrument.

Audiences loved him for his great technical power and lightning speed, combined with a passionate and dramatic interpretation. In addition to all of this, his stage presence was electrifying.

Tracks:

Les Preludes
Mazeppa (Transcendental Study No. 8)
Liszt Liebestraum No. 3
La Campanella (Paganini Etude No. 3)
Les Jeux d'ear la Villa d'Este
Vallee d’Obermann
Sonetto 104 del Petrarca
Mephisto Waltz No. 1
Listener’s Guide to Liszt: The Young Prodigy
Listener’s Guide to Liszt: Virtuoso
Listener’s Guide to Liszt: Years of Pilgrimage
Listener’s Guide to Liszt: Lisztomania
Listener’s Guide to Liszt: Harmonic Innovations
Listener’s Guide to Liszt: Weimar: Symphonic Poems
Listener’s Guide to Liszt: Abbe Liszt
Late Innovations & The Legacy of Liszt

Haydn and the Classical Period

More than any other composer, Franz Joseph Haydn deserves to be called the father of music's "Classical" style. As he came of age in the mid-eighteenth century, musical thinking was in the midst of profound changes. The compositional forms and procedures of the Baroque era began to seem old-fashioned and composers sought fresh modes of musical expression. Out of their search emerged brand new musical forms, most notably the symphony and string quartet, and a new style that valued poetic melodies and harmonies over "learned" counterpoint.

Haydn played a crucial role in establishing new classical forms. For all practical purposed he invented the string quartet as a musical form, and his contributions to the symphony helped develop that format from a modest off-shoot of the opera overture into the most potent and attractive type of instrumental music available to composers.

Haydn's symphonies established the defining traits of this most important genre of music, and they were the source from which all subsequent developments in the symphonic composition would spring. He developed the concept of the orchestra as an organic whole. Haydn wrote for each instrument in keeping with its natural character, and in a way that would blend well with the other members of the orchestra. Moreover, Haydn established procedures of thematic development, particularly the technique of deriving whole passages from a single brief melodic idea. His extraordinary imagination and freshness served as an ideal of musical inventiveness to generations of later composers.

Haydn's Early Life and Career

Haydn was born in 1732 into a humble family in Rohrau, a small town near the present-day border of Austria and Hungary. He was no child prodigy, but his fine singing voice won him a place in a choir school in a nearby town. There, Haydn remembered, he received "more thrashings than food," but he received a basic education in music. When he was seven, Haydn gained a place in the choir of Saint Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, now famous as the Vienna Boys Choir. He resided at cathedral school for most of the next decade, acquiring a solid, though not spectacular, musical and general education.