YMMV / Franz Liszt

• Creator Worship: Liszt was, for all intents and purposes, a rock star before the word was even invented. He was known for his smoldering good looks, and his piano playing was so intoxicating it would send women into fits of the vapours. Literally. There was even a word coined for it: "Lisztomania", as women were sent into states akin to religious ecstasy, and then fought each other for bits of his clothing. One woman even picked up one of his discarded cigars, had it encased in gold and diamonds, and monogrammed with his initials.
• Estrogen Brigade: Not surprisingly given his dashing good looks and flowing hair.
• Evil Is Cool: As Leonard Bernstein pointed out, Liszt wrote an awful lot of music dedicated to Mephistopheles.
• Memetic Badass: His name still stands for "impossibly difficult piano music," even beyond connoisseurs of Classical Music.
• Moment of Awesome: Liszt was the first person ever to perform the notoriously difficult Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major (Hammerklavier) by Ludwig van Beethoven, cementing his Memetic Badass status as the best piano player of his time.
• Old Guard Versus New Blood: The War of the Romantics. Liszt was the informal leader of the New German School, a loose group of German composers who wrote progressive music inspired by Hector Berlioz and Robert Schumann. His most important colleague was his friend and son-in-law Richard Wagner. Their opponents, the conservatives, were greater in numbers and support and included Johannes Brahms, Felix Mendelssohn, and Schumann's widow Clara Schumann. Interestingly, both sides heralded Ludwig van Beethoven as their idol. The war was somewhat settled when Arnold Schoenberg declared during the early 20th century that Brahms and Wagner were similar and took them both as a basis for his new music, featuring atonality and twelve tone technique and helping create a whole new schism between 19th century music and his comparatively radical compositions.
• Vindicated by History: While his skills as a pianist have always been unanimously agreed to be great, his compositions were very divisive during his lifetime. Robert Schumann and Johannes Brahms in particular united against him, along with their supporters. This schism became (in)famous enough to warrant being given a name, the War of the Romantics. During the 20th century, his more atonal works such as the Faust-Sinfonie and his late period piano works became acclaimed by avant-garde composers.
  • His most expressive pieces, such as Totentanz, are now seen as a link between Romanticism and early Modern Classical.
  • And his reputation still continues to grow! It's only by now that the broad consensus of critics acclaim his immense innovations as a composer and performer, some even pointing towards him as the single most important composer of the 19th century after Beethoven's death, even ahead of Wagner or Brahms.

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