Liszt, the music pedagogue

Franz Liszt, who himself, studied among others, with Carl Czerny a student of Beethoven and with the elderly Antonio Salieri, began his activity as a piano teacher while still very young. As the virtuoso left behind the child prodigy stage he earned a living by giving piano lessons and the first great love of his life is also connected to this activity: in 1828 while still a teenager Liszt fell in love with one of his students of aristocratic birth. The beautiful but also adolescent Caroline de Saint-Cricq reciprocated the young man’s feelings, but her father the count put an end to the budding affair as well as to the piano lessons that transgressed social barriers.

Quite a number of young female students in love with the great musician later appeared around Liszt whose master courses given in Weimar in the 1850s began to take clearer shape. The cautious formulation is justified because the music-making and lively conversation in the friendly company that gathered around Liszt on Sunday afternoons (where the excellent pianist and conductor, Hans von Bülow who later became his son-in-law also played a modest part) only gradually became a specifically pedagogical gathering. But the courses in Weimar, and those held later in other cities, retained their social character throughout: Liszt acted simultaneously as informal teacher and genial host, and it was not unusual for the teaching to be accompanied by a game of cards and drinks. It is characteristic of the informality of the teaching that the lessons were occasionally given in restaurants, and summer excursions with an even more relaxed atmosphere did no harm to Liszt’s prestige either. “He kisses them on the forehead, strokes their cheeks, sometimes pats them on the shoulder, quite sharply, if he wants to draw their attention especially to something,” one of his Russian admirers, the composer Alexander Borodin, reported on Liszt’s teaching style.

In view of this method it may appear paradoxical that the greatest and still internationally significant result of the music pedagogical activity of Liszt, who was such an informal teacher, is a serious institution, the Budapest Academy of Music. He worked together with Erkel for the foundation of the Academy of Music, and after he was appointed in 1875 president of the institution that still did not have a real base or suitable building, teaching began in Liszt’s accommodation in Hal tér. And when in 1879 the academy finally moved into the neo-Renaissance palace on Andrássy út, Liszt moved together with the institution and right up to the year of his death continued his piano master school here in what is now the building of the Franz Liszt Memorial Museum and Research Centre. “My best hours are when I am teaching in the new academy of music,” he wrote in a letter, and his courses that were still held in the same relaxed, paternal atmosphere attracted to Pest students from all over the world following in the footsteps of Liszt. He did not give piano lessons in the traditional sense in Pest either, he did not teach fingerings, and as he listened to his students’ playing, the virtuoso who was deservedly celebrated in old age too was far more interested in the spirit of the performance than in the mere technique. “What does he care for the precision of the performance if there is life in it! […] away with hidebound schoolmastery!” was how Eugène d’Albert, perhaps his most outstanding late student, now known mainly as an opera composer, described his master’s teaching manner.

“Today’s youth are so spoiled that they now play my works from memory,” in the witty, self-deprecating remark made by the elderly Liszt who not only nurtured and encouraged the talented youth he discovered at his lessons but also effectively supported their careers, at times making considerable sacrifices. These students included his future successor at the Academy of Music: the excellent István Thomán who later taught Béla Bartók and Ernő Dohnányi. And if we take into account the chain of teachers through the generations we find that Liszt’s activity as a music teacher is still just as much a living memory in Hungarian music training and our entire music life as his most popular compositions.