This year the 200th anniversary of Ferenc Liszt’s birth is celebrated with concerts, piano concerts, exhibitions and conferences. It is a lucky coincidence that Hungary will take over the presidency of the European Union this year, in the first half of 2011, which provides an opportunity for introducing the works and his admitted Hungarian features all over Europe, with the help of Hungarofest KLASSZ Zenei Iroda. The events of the Liszt Year will be realised due to the cooperation of Hungarian cultural institutes and several international supporters. The ambassador of the Hungarian Liszt Year will be Zoltán Kocsis.
Liszt Year in 2011 in Hungary and all over the world
Ferenc Liszt was an amazingly colourful personality and a musician with an eventful life in the 19th century Europe. In the course of the events organised for the year of the bicentenary, we will be able to simultaneously become acquainted with his love for Hungary and European vision, his deep artistic commitment and sophisticated elegance, his widely celebrated virtuosity and his intimate religious feelings. Liszt was a broad-minded, intelligent and independent European world citizen, who felt comfortable in every corner of the world. He was not only a composer, but a music pedagogue as well, who practically launched the operation of the Music Academy in his own flat in Pest. The musician, who turned to Catholicism later with the aim to reform Roman liturgical music, enriched the genre of religious music with grandiose oratories and masses, and in 1865 he even received the courtesy title abbot.
The events of the 2011 memorial year would like to introduce the multiple layers of Ferenc Liszt’s human and artistic personality in order to get closer to the composer celebrated at his bicentenary, as well as the social, material and intellectual environment of his diverse operation, due to modelling this complexity. The preparations for the celebration have been in progress for years all over the world. The events in Hungary are coordinated by Hungarofest Nonprofit Kft. KLASSZ Zenei Iroda, also supported by the International Liszt Association, which was created due to a Hungarian initiation and which is currently being registered, the aim of which is to coordinate Hungarian and foreign professional institutions, professionals and festivals which would like to make more and more people become acquainted with Liszt’s oeuvre, and continue Liszt’s tradition.
An outstanding event of the Liszt Year will definitely be the World Liszt Day, within the framework of which several orchestras will play Ferenc Liszt's grandiose Christ oratory from Paris to Seoul on 22 October 2011, on Liszt's birthday, in a year from now. It is also important to highlight the Liszt Marathon, which will be held in May at the Millenáris, during which young and older visitors can enjoy crossover concerts, in addition to classical music. The artistic leader, Dénes Várjon carefully compiled the programme of the international chamber music festival "Liszt and Europe" for next autumn, with the participation of world-famous national and international performers.
The Liszt Year is an excellent opportunity to make Hungary and Hungarian culture visible and audible not only within our borders but all over Europe and the whole world as well through the music of the virtuoso Ferenc Liszt, who claimed himself to be a true Hungarian, supported by outstandingly talented Hungarian artists. The events planned for the Liszt Year prove that our country has had a deserved place between the first-line representatives of classical music for centuries.
Images
Images: Klassz Zenei Iroda, Liszt Ferenc Zeneakadémia
Ferenc Liszt
In spite of his international success as a piano player, composer and conductor and his unquestionable reputation, Liszt displayed a humble behaviour towards arts and people all through his life. He proved his devotedness to his country and his sense of responsibility towards his fellow people, when he organised a charity concert in Vienna for the victims of the flood in Pest in 1838, and what is more, he organised ten concerts instead of the originally planned six. Altogether he collected 24,000 golden forints, and he sent this amount, which was the largest private donation, to Hungarian people.
He expressed his respect for Beethoven’s art with another donation: in 1839 he offered a larger amount to the Beethoven Memorial Association in Bonn, and he found an appropriate artist, the famous sculptor from Florence, Lorenzo Bartolini, who prepared a monument statue for the composer in Bonn.
In order to create a complete picture of Liszt’s art, Alan Walker analyses Liszt as a writer in his book as well. The quoted sentences show a parallel between his behaviour as a human being and as an artist: “A person has to grow as a human being first, then he can become an artist” – he said. And he writes: “Isn’t the genius the same as the sacred power of priests, through which God becomes visible for the human soul?" He means that an artist has a prophetic role in the society, similarly to prominent apostles in religion.
When he lived in Rome in 1865, he received a few minor orders, which surprised many people, even his closest friends. The person, who considered himself to be “only" the priest of arts, became an abbot in a cassock, in order to find the "true way" in his private life and in his arts as well. “I was convinced that this action confirms that I chose the good way, and I did it easily with a very simple and straight intention. By the way, this is in accordance with my past aims as a young person, and with the development, which my musical compositions went through in the last four years, and I would like to continue this work with a renewed enthusiasm, because this is the least imperfect form of my nature" (Walker’s book quotes his letter to Constantin von Hohenzollern-Herchingen). He believed that his art has a mission, and that as an artist he has to mediate between God and human beings.
His faith in the power of music was also shown in his respect to his great predecessors, because he respected and supported (often financially as well) his fellow composers. He supported the artists in need because he thought that they serve the same purpose as he does, and that “they are members of the same family”. He wore his medals on the stages because he wanted to elevate the place of artists in society, and sometimes he acted for admired composers as well with this aim, when e.g. Wagner and Berlioz received the Order of the White Hawk upon his recommendation from Carl Alexander, Duke of Weimar. After 1835 he did not ask for money from his students, because he felt that art as the gift of God should only be conveyed as a gift, as he concisely put it: „Genie oblige!”
More about Ferenc Liszt:
Liszt, the celebrated world-star
Liszt, the Hungarian citizen of the world
Source: http://www.lisz-2011.hu
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