Of mixed Austro-Hungarian parentage, Franz Liszt was born in western Hungary. Although he had only rudimentary piano instruction until he was ten, at eleven his playing astonished musical Vienna - including Beethoven and Schubert - and he conquered Paris and London before he was 13. In his 20s and 30s, he stretched the frontiers of piano virtuosity to unprecedented limits, as his model, Paganini, had done for the violin a few years earlier. Liszt became the most celebrated pianist in history and the darling of European society, famed, too, for his many love affairs. He lived for nearly five years with Countess Marie d'Agoult, who abandoned her husband for him; Cosima, the second of their three children, married Richard Wagner. In 1848 Liszt became music director to the Grand Duke of Weimar, where he lived for 13 years, twelve of them with Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein - who also left her husband for him. A champion of the music of his great contemporaries, at Weimar he conducted new or recent works by Donizetti, Berlioz, Schumann, Wagner and Verdi, as well as his own. He taught many gifted pupils, but also dedicated much of his energy to composing: the catalogue of his works, especially those for orchestra, for chorus and, of course, for his own instrument, the piano, is vast.

Beset by difficulties, he moved to Rome in 1861, and four years later he took minor orders in the Catholic church. In later years he often held piano master classes in Budapest and Weimar. Some of his best pupils, including Moriz Rosenthal and the conductor Felix Weingartner, were still active in the 1940s. His reputation as a composer has had many ups and downs, but the originality of his harmonic and formal experiments has never been in doubt. His character, too, has been the subject of much debate, but his princely generosity to colleagues was almost universally acknowledged.