Franz Liszt - Musical Works

Musical Works

Liszt was a prolific composer. He is best known for his piano music, but he wrote extensively for many media. Because of his background as a technical piano virtuoso, Liszt's piano works are often marked by their difficulty. Liszt is very well known as a programmatic composer, or an individual who bases his compositional ideas in extra-musical things such as a poetry or painting. Liszt is credited with the creation of the symphonic poem, which is a programmatic orchestral work that generally consists of a single movement.

Liszt's compositional style delved deeply into issues of unity both within and across movements. For this reason, in his most famous and virtuosic works, he is an archetypal Romantic composer. Liszt pioneered the technique of thematic transformation, a method of development which was related to both the existing variation technique and to the new use of the Leitmotif by Richard Wagner.