![]() From the very commencement of his career, when during his early life in Paris (1829), he was giving lessons every day from half-past eight in the morning until ten at night. ![]() His letters, left to the Princess Caroline Wittgenstein, indicate that “at least so far as concerned his own compositions, he was one of the most modest and unselfish of men, one who made it his first aim to help with the works of other composers rather than his own.” 3 It has been written that “he was endowed with wonderful powers of penetration, and always seems to been able to adapt himself to the feelings and position of the individual to whom he was writing. Then the function of the left side of the heart also became impaired, bronchopneumonia set in, and he died at Bayreuth on July 24, 1886. He continued to play the piano and teach, but developed an increasingly debilitating chronic lung disease, causing classical right heart failure, so-called cor pulmonale, and manifested by severe edema or swelling of the entire body, eventually to massive proportions. Cataracts impaired his vision, and he had to sit very close to the keyboard. Pain and swelling from osteoarthritis of the fingers made it difficult to play the piano. 2 He often drank heavily, and smoked several pipes and strong cheap Havana cigars every day.Īt about seventy, old age and excessive smoking caught up with him. He was idolized as an artist but also criticized: in Germany for being a Magyar, in Hungary for his Teutonic tendencies (he never learned his mother tongue), and in Paris for not being French born. In his “gypsy-like extravagant youth” he ran away with the countess wife of a nobleman and later lived openly with a married princess at Weimar. At one time he had an episode of infectious hepatitis from which he promptly recovered. He relished drinking coffee and eating smoked oysters. Beyond that he seems to have been in good health. ![]() There is a report of an incident in 1835 where he fainted while giving a concert, apparently from a vasovagal attack. A sickly child who had not been expected to live, Liszt had his share of childhood illnesses, including a severe reaction to smallpox vaccination. He was born in 1811 in Hungary, where his father was a steward to the same Esterhazy family that had once employed Joseph Haydn. 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. Like Mozart and Mendelssohn, Franz Liszt was a musical prodigy.
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