ABSTRACT
Franz Liszt began his musical career as a performer, but he rapidly transformed performance practices—most particularly, fantasizing and improvisation—into compositional matrices. His years as an apprentice began in 1819, with his first encounter with Carl Czerny, to the publication in 1829 of his first representative virtuoso composition: the Grande fantasie sur la Tyrolienne de La fiancée. What Liszt learned at the keyboard and learned to do at the keyboard (two somewhat different activities), he subsequently taught to do “in the leaf” – not only with the piano, but also with the organ, the orchestra, instrumental ensembles, and eventually the voice. This was true especially of the keyboard fantasy of its conventions and the fantasies Liszt himself composed. The present chapter examines the most musically significant aspects of Liszt’s apprenticeship and compares what he did during the 1820s with the accomplishments of his contemporaries, especially Frédéric Chopin. It also refers briefly to Liszt’s use of certain musical topics (or topoi) as well as harmonic aspects of sonata form and other modes of musical expression.
