![]() The relative paucity of nineteenth-century celebrity photographs may seem bizarre in an age of publicity-image prodigality all the more reason to cherish every one of these 260 photos. This photo-documentary ends with his old age when, better known as the father of Wagner’s wife, a virtuoso of times gone by, he was yet a composer whose B minor sonata had become a monument more lasting than bronze. Nonetheless, he retains traits of his earlier physical attractiveness and that mesmerising mental edge shining through the features that helped inscribe him on Europe’s consciousness as a cultural hero and musical demi-god. The most noticeable change, particularly from a publicity-conscious, air-brush-wielding, 21st-century point of view, is the growth of the warts on his face (above), which became ever more child- and adult-repulsive as the years rolled by, but which were never disguised in the photographs. In late middle age, he took Holy Orders and appeared thereafter in clerical dress, having become a sort of Weimar “sage” and largely misunderstood avant-garde composer. 49m IMDb RATING 7.2 /10 61 YOUR RATING Rate Biography Drama Family A dashing Franz Liszt appears to have it all - talent, success, wealth and adoring fans. Alexander Glazunov: Violin Concerto Modest Mussorgsky/Gorchakov: Pictures at an Exhibition. For the most part, he appears or attempts to appear youthful, especially in the gorgeous PR photographs from the 1840s. Franz Liszt: Totentanz Sergei Prokofiev: Suite from Romeo and. ![]() Not once do we see him on stage, surrounded by the knicker-throwing teenage girls and groupies we know about from written sources. It has to be said, however, that one is pretty much like the other as one leafs from one clutch to the next, and, although Burger is to be congratulated on his detective work in terms of dates and identifications, the images are often of the sanitised, press-pack variety: Liszt in right-hand profile, in stylish pose. Ernst Burger has spent four decades collecting these sepia images, most of which appear here for the first time. By age twelve he was ranked one of the best piano players in Europe. At eight, he could read difficult music, and two years later he was composing music himself. He played the piano when he was five years old. Why would anyone want to look at 260 carte-de-visite photographs of the pianist and composer Franz Liszt? Taken from his early middle age in 1843, around the time of the birth of photography itself, until his death in 1886, they are a visual record of the man who, by anyone’s reckoning, was one of the greatest luminaries of Romanticism-there can hardly be a single artist in any medium of his period or since whose work, image, and personality were so widely known. Like Mozart and Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt was a musical prodigy.
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