‘Louis Lortie’

Any theme related to visionary minds, one of the central topics of the music season at BOZAR, must certainly include Richard Wagner, who questioned the genre of opera and who wrote a number of manifests explaining his all-embracing view of the arts. As the creator of Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner made an ineradicable impression on musical theatre, literature, philosophy, the visual arts and, of course, music. The answer was found in atonality and the serial music produced by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern.
However, Wagner’s status as it is today is largely due to Franz Liszt, the Hungarian infant prodigy, piano virtuoso, superstar, womanizer, composer, scholar and trailblazer for many composers who followed. He was one of the first to recognise Wagner’s genius. Liszt’s arrangements for the piano helped introduce Wagner’s music to a wider audience. Or, as Daniel Barenboim puts it: “Liszt [...] influenced tangibly and forcefully the path that music was to take. Wagner could not have become the great composer he was without Liszt. Liszt is a key figure in music history.”