Although recognized as a major figure of the turbulent Romantic era, his reputation remains shaky. Ironically, it was Liszt’s own unrelenting efforts on behalf of “the music of the future” - not only Wagner’s but other avant-garde voices of the era, including Berlioz’s - that helped establish the familiar paradigm whereby daring musical innovators are eventually vindicated by posterity.īut Liszt remains a case apart. Many have followed her lead and tend to think of Liszt as a Wagnerian pretender - a kind of entertaining sideshow to the real story of musical “progress” in the nineteenth century. She had him buried in Bayreuth near her recently deceased husband, Richard Wagner.īy keeping her father close by, literally overshadowed by Wagner’s grave, Cosima was trying to take control of Liszt’s legacy. In spite of the claims of Hungary - the land of his birth - and the city of Weimar in central Germany - where he pursued some of his most significant musical achievements as a composer and a reformer - his daughter Cosima ended up winning the battle. Liszt had spent his career orbiting a wide swath of Europe, so there were conflicting proposals as to where he should be interred. “FRANZ LISZT WAS a lightning rod for controversy throughout his long life, and even after: the moment he died (while attending the Bayreuth Festival in 1886), his corpse became the subject of a heated dispute. His bicentennial encourages a fuller understanding of the much-maligned Franz Liszt
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