Life of Franz Liszt - The Child Prodigy

The Child Prodigy

On September 20, 1823, the Liszt family left Vienna for Paris. To support himself and his parents, Liszt gave concerts in Munich, Augsburg, Stuttgart and Strasbourg. In Miesich he was regarded as an equal to the boy Mozart. On December 11, 1823, the family arrived in Paris. The next day, Adam Liszt together with his son went to the Conservatoire, hoping the child prodigy would be accepted as a student. But Cherubini, the director, told them that according to a new rule only the French were allowed to take part in piano class. Consequentially, Adam Liszt, who had very despotic manners, now became his son's only piano teacher. He had his son practise scales and études with a metronome and also play a number of fugues by J. S. Bach every day, transposing them into different keys.

Liszt learned French quickly and it became his main language. He made the acquaintance of the piano manufacturer Sébastien Érard, pioneer of the "double-escapement" system of piano mechanics. Liszt played in private circles and gave concerts on March 7 and April 12, 1824, at the Theâtre Italiènne, quickly augmenting his popularity. He was well known in Paris as petit Liszt ("little Liszt"). In 1824, 1825 and 1827, together with his father, he visited England, where he was known as "Master Liszt". His share of the admissions was large enough for his father to invest a sum of 60,000 Francs in bonds of his former employer Prince Esterházy. The principal was repaid in 1866 when Liszt's mother died. She had until then received the interest payments.

Since 1824, Liszt studied composition with Anton Reicha and Ferdinando Paer. From Adam Liszt's letters it is known that his son had composed several concertos, sonatas, works of chamber music, and much more. While nearly all of those works are lost, some piano works of 1824 were published. These pieces were written in the common style of the contemporary brilliant Viennese school. He had taken works of his former master Czerny as a model, which Liszt's later virtuoso rivals Sigismond Thalberg and Theodor Döhler would also emulate. The response to these early works was disheartening. In spring 1824, with Paer's help, Liszt started composing an opera Don Sanche, ou Le château de l'amour ("Don Sanche, or The Castle of Love"). Conducted by Rodolphe Kreutzer, with Adolphe Nourrit as Don Sanche, the opera premiered on October 17, 1825 at the Académie royale de Musique, but without success. Liszt afterwards felt drawn in a different direction. He started disliking music and spent much time with religious ideas. However, he was forced by his father to continue giving concerts. In 1826 in Marseille he started composing original etudes. They were projected as 48 pieces, but only 12 pieces were realized and published as his Opus 6.

In summer 1827, Liszt fell ill. Adam Liszt went with his son to Boulogne-sur-Mer, a spa town on the English Channel. While Liszt himself was recovering, his father fell ill with typhus. On August 28, 1827, Adam Liszt died. Liszt composed a short funeral march which might have carried a double meaning. Together with his father, the concertizing child prodigy had died. Adam Liszt was buried in Boulogne. Liszt never visited his father's grave.

In later years, Liszt himself always took a skeptical point of view regarding his career as child prodigy. While he had earned much money and gained a prominent name, his general education had had no chance of development. He made up for this lack by intense reading. Starting in the early 1830s, he read voraciously, and by the time of his death in 1886 he had acquired many thousands of books. Regarding his compositional oeuvre as child prodigy, he wrote to Lina Ramann in March 1880 that nothing had come of it because there was nothing to it. For young as well as for old composers it was always the best when the manuscripts were lost, he felt.