Piano-Forte - Chopin and Liszt

Yet, even though Liszt is rarely performed in the concert hall these days, he deserves his place in the same pantheon of composers as Mozart and Beethoven for the simple reason music would not have been the same without him. The term "recital" comes from Liszt. Budding piano players learn from his piano pieces. He pioneered the symphonic poem, which freed orchestral music from the constraints of the classical symphony. His emotionally-charged works helped create the language of Romanticism. He virtually invented the art of conducting, bringing a piece to life rather than simply beating time. And all the composers that came after - many whom he befriended - drew their inspiration from him, from Wagner to Debussy. By the time he died in 1886, the Romantic movement for which he was so responsible was in full flower, with foreshadowings of modernism for which he also deserves credit.

Frederic Chopin's life is no less interesting: A man who found himself an exile from his native Poland after a failed revolution while on a trip abroad, he eventually wound up in Paris not only as part of a thriving Polish emigre community, but as member of an exalted musical scene that included Berlioz, Mendelssohn, and Liszt (who would be one of Chopin's greatest admirers). There would follow a 10-year relationship with the flamboyant novelist George Sand, six years his elder, who would be all things to him, from intellectual companion to lover to mother figure. And always, there was the matter of his health. He nearly died after a bitter winter on the island of Majorca with George Sand. Somehow, he managed to make it another 10 years to age 39.

If there is any doubt into Chopin's depressive temperament, one need only read it straight from the man, himself:

"Why do we live on through this wretched life which only devours us and serves to turn us into corpses? The clocks in the Stuttgart belfries strike the midnight hour. Oh how many people have become corpses at this moment! Mothers have been torn from their children, children from their mothers - how many plans have come to nothing, how much sorrow has sprung from these depths, and how much relief!... Virtue and vice have come in the end to the same thing! It seems that to die is man's finest action - and what might be his worst? To be born, since that is the

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