Portraits · Composers · X of XVII

Franz Liszt

1811–1886 · Composer and pianist

My mission is to work on unpretendingly and without troubling myself about advancement.
Meine Aufgabe bleibt anspruchslos fortzuarbeiten, ohne Bekümmerniss des Fortkommens!
Franz Liszt · letter to a friend, 1881

Read it in the source →

Franz Liszt wrote this in May 1881, aged 69, to the Hungarian composer and writer Kornél Ábrányi. A festival in Antwerp was about to give his Gran Mass, a work, he said, more abused by the critics than heard. He had left the programme to the committee: he had no wish to recommend any work of his own.

Twenty-eight years earlier he had dated the autograph of his Sonata in B minor.

Letter no. 277 to Kornél von Ábrányi, Weimar, 13 May 1881. Letters of Franz Liszt, ed. La Mara, trans. Constance Bache (London: H. Grevel & Co., 1894), vol. II, p. 380. German: La Mara (ed.), Franz Liszt's Briefe, Bd. 2: Von Rom bis an's Ende (Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1893), p. 308.

The originals

Sepia photograph of Franz Liszt in 1886, long white hair to the shoulders, a white clerical collar and dark coat, looking at the camera — **The likeness**PHOTOGRAPHED BY NADAR · 1886Our portrait is painted after it.Public domain (albumen print, March 1886; the Nadar studio's Félix Nadar died 1910 and Paul Nadar 1939). Wikimedia Commons, via Sotheby's.

A handwritten page of piano music in brown ink, with whole passages crossed out by large red-orange X marks — **Sonata in B minor, 1853**Dated 2 February 1853 and dedicated to Robert Schumann. On this page of the autograph, whole passages are struck through in red.Autograph manuscript, p. 25, dated 2 February 1853 on its title page. Public domain; facsimile via IMSLP #68292 and Wikimedia Commons (File:Liszt_sonata_autograph_page_25.jpg).