![]() ![]() By 1835, when he eloped to Switzerland and thence to Italy with the Countess Marie d’Agoult, his reputation as a performer was unparalleled, but his work as a composer was relatively unknown. He met and befriended almost every person of artistic consequence in early 1830s Paris, including Paganini, Berlioz, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Alkan, Hiller, Auber, Bellini, Meyerbeer, Delacroix, Ingres, Hugo, Heine, Balzac, Georges Sand and Dumas père. But these years also saw the beginnings of Liszt’s lifelong devotion to Christianity and his interest in some of the more progressive religious philosophies of the day, especially those of Lamartine and Lammenais, whom he knew personally. He was a strikingly handsome young man, and in much demand by ladies of all ages, leading to many a legend of sexual conquest, and a fame of altogether greater proportion than the world of art music has seen before or since. His remaining education, acquired on the hoof, as it were, saw him mixing in the most important social and artistic circles in Paris, reading and practising voraciously, having his only opera – Don Sanche – given in 1826, the year he first visited England, and publishing a number of early piano works, principally the Étude en quarante-huit exercices . At the age of fourteen, he went with his father to Paris, and adopted French to such an extent that it remained his mother tongue for the rest of his life. In 1822 he met Beethoven, whose bestowed blessing he counted the most important formative experience of his musical life. His talent manifested itself very early, and his brief formal education culminated in studies in Vienna, principally with Czerny and Reicha. Hungarian composer, conductor, pianist and teacher – was born in Raiding (now in Austria), the son of Adam Liszt, a minor official on the Esterházy estate, and his wife Anna, née Lager.
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