Franz Liszt
October 22, 1811 - July 31, 1886
Franz Liszt was born in Raiding, Hungary in 1811, was a very dilicate and sickly boy until he reached the age of six. He began to study the piano at the age of six. One day while his father was playing a Concerto on the piano, little Franz came up beside him and implored him to repear that last movement over and over again. "What would you like to when you grow up?" asked his father while lighting his pipe. "That man there!" said the boy pointing to a picture of Beethoven. The next day his father began giving him lessons. Franz spent hours practicing the scales and made such rapid progress that he played in a concert by the time he was nine years old. The preformance was so brilliant that everybody wanted to meet him and six of the nobles present raised funds to send him to Vienna for study with Czerny. Later "little Liszt" enjoyed a greater triumph for, when Bethoven heard him play in 1821, he was so amazed by Franz's wonderful technique that he went to the stage, grasped the child, and kissed him on the forehead.
Because the little village of Raiding was rather isolated, it became a camping place for wandering gypsie, who as they arrived in their wagons, would pitch their tents in the square. At night, amid the blaze of great bon-fires, the men with violins and cymbals, and the the girls brilliant colored dresses, earrings, and necklaces, would dance and sing the rugged folk-tunes of Romany. Little Franz would drink in these weirdly abrupt rhythms and melodies which laster became so evident to his famous Hungarian Rhapsodies.
In 1866 he joined the priesthood and was given the religious title of Abbè by the Pope Pius IX and in 1875 he was appointed president of the New Hungarian Academy of Music, Budapest.
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