28 Dec 2010

Franz Liszt: A Romantic remembered

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/classical/features/franz-liszt-a-romantic-remembered-2170152.html

By Nicola Christie [The Independent, 28 December 2010]

The first 12 days of January on BBC Radio 3 are going to feature Mozart, back-to-back. If the programmers were braver, they would have gone for Franz Liszt instead. Austrian demi-god, the first popstar, a 19th-century wonder who transcribed the entire set of Beethoven symphonies for piano - just to get them out - "saved" Wagner's operas from extinction when the composer himself was in exile, and generally changed the course of the music world forever.