這是今年三月間Gramophone的封面故事，除探討Liszt不為後人喜歡的原因，最重要的目的還是希望讀者能夠重新認識這位作曲家。

文章結構清楚，觀點有力，用三段論法點出一般人看待李斯特的刻板印象，接著解釋刻板印象背後李斯特的不同面向，最後解釋他遭人誤解的原因，其中並穿插李斯特的趣事，也對此人性格較多著墨，寫得深入淺出。

以及，封面故事不是短文，分上下兩篇，請各自取用吧。
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We are one looking for a yardstick by which to identify someone's musical tastes, few composers fulfill the function better than Franz Liszt.

You either get him or you don't. His music is to love or to loath. A few years ago, while compiling a list of 50 greatest composers for a book, my erudite and music-loving publisher balked at the inclusion of Liszt. "Liszt?" he moaned. "What about Tallis and Victoria and Schutz? Far more important!" He did have the grace to admit that he didn't know much about Liszt the man, and that he had not heard a great deal of his music. His perception was based on a handful of what he characterized as "flashy" works-- and they had not appealed to his refined sensibilities. My publisher's allergy, I have found, is not uncommon. 
 

On the other side of the fence, those of us who worship at the shrine look on non-believers with the same degree of pity that a doctor reserves for a geriatric with incurable arthritis: we'd like to help but there's nothing we can do. Ignorance and preconceptions are frequent symptoms of Lisztophobia. My publisher's affliction was cured, in part, by sending him some representative CDs of some of the best Liszt from all genres in top-class performances. He claimed to be, as a result, if not a convert then at least surprised by the variety and quality of the music, and at how much he had enjoyed these discoveries.
 

This simple course of treatment merely disabused my friend regarding Liszt's music (to which we shall come in a moment), but there is much more to Liszt than "just" LIszt the composer. He is a significant figure in several other areas of musical endeavor, and a complex, contradictory one at that, making him an endlessly fascinating subject for musicology and biographer.
 

He was born on Octobor 22, 1811, at Raiding, near Odenberg, Hungary(now in Austria). His father, an excellent musician, was a minor court functionary in the service of the Esterhazy family, the same aristocrats who, a few years earlier, had employed Haydn. In fact, had Liszt been born two years earlier, his lifespan would have overlapped with both Haydn and Stravinsky, neatly mirroring the span of the musical bridge he represents, taking in as it does (and indeed exemplifying) the whole of the Romantic movement and the yet unformulated worlds of Impressionism, atonality and dissonance.
 

The young Liszt was a keyboard wunderkind. At the age of nine he played Ries's Piano Concerto in E

flat, op42, in public and extemporized on themes submitted by the audience. He studied with Czerny who, however, refused to accept any payment, such was the pleasure of teaching him. Salieri trained him in composition; Beethoven is said to have bestowed his blessing on the boy by publicly kissing his brow ("Devil of a fellow! Such a young rascal!"). By his mid-teens, Liszt was established as one of the foremost living pianists. Many years later, by which time he was one of the most famous men in Europe, he was having his portrait painted by the French artist Ary Scheffer. Liszt took a post that "assumed an air of inspiration". "he devil Liszt!" exclaimed Scheffer. "Don't put on the airs of a man of genius with me. You know well enough that I am not fooled by it." And what was Liszt's reply? There was silence for a moment. "You are right, my dear friend. But pardon me. You do not know how it spoils one to have been an infant prodigy." 

Liszt 's pianistic gifts and the electrifying effect his playing had on listeners have been widely documented. He was a phenomenal sight-reader: "Liszt," wrote the despairing Clara Schumann, "played at sight what we toil over and at the end get nowhere with." When she first heard him, she broke down and sobbed. Grieg described how Liszt sight-read the manuscript of his Piano Concerto. "Not content with playing, he at the same time converses and makes comments, addressing a bright remark now to one, now to another...." He invented with the concept of solo piano recital. Helped by a charismatic stage presence and a flair for showmanship, he could whip up an audience into a state of frenzy. Ladies were known to have flung jewels on the stage instead of bouquets; sometimes they fainted. There were unkind rumours that they were paid to do so. Only Paganini had produced such an effect on an audience, and Liszt had the advantage of striking good looks.

How did he do it all? Music simply poured out of him. Inspiration, the creative urge, is one thing, and the physical, time-consuming labour of producing a score another (true, he had help from the likes of Raff in orchestrating certain works), but simultaneously to invent new forms (the symphonic poem), develop others (B minor sonata), and experiment with harmonic language as well as undertaking all the other activities listed above-- well, "remarkable" seems a barely adequate description.
 

Leslie Howard, president of the Liszt Society, whose recording of the complete piano works is likely to remain a unique achievement (over 120 hours of music on nearly 100 CDs), is keen to emphasize Liszt's place in musical history. "Any composer worth twopence knows that by the middle of the 1850's Liszt had already worked out ways in which tonality could be subverted. He'd already invented the 12-note row and used the whole-tone scale many times, the first time in the Grande Fantaisie sur la Clochette which he wrote in 1831 when he was 19. Every composer in the 19th century acquired Liszt's music in order to learn things from it. Marvelous as his piano music is, the rest of his output is, in many ways, even more important. The music of Mahler, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Richard Strauss would not be as it is if Liszt had not written orchestral works. Yet while many people's symphonic poems get played and recorded, Liszt's are very badly served. His Masses and oratorios scarcely get done at all. I don't know why. Christus, I think, is arguably his greatest work."
 

Howard is equally in no doubt about Liszt's stature as a man. "He was the most photographed man of the 19th century and the most sculpted man after Napoleon. He had a social way with him that won the hearts of those who knew him personally. None of those who spoke ill of him ever did so to his face because his personality was very powerful. There was no door of any court or state in Europe that Liszt couldn't walk through. You can't say that of any other composer of the time. Imagine if Wagner had tried to ingratiate himself with Pope Pius IX!"
 

Yet what are these missiles flying through the air labeled "charlatan", "self-promoter", "superficial"?

Here is the critic Eduard Hanslick in 1874: "The main objection against Liszt is that he imposes a much bigger-- and abusive-- mission on the subject of his work: namely either to fill the gap left by the absence of musical content or to justify the atrociousness of such content as there is." Hanslick detested him. "After Liszt, Mozart is like a soft spring breeze penetrating a room reeking of fumes." The English critics were not to be outdone. Frederick Corder, a composer himself who prepared the English editions of Wagner's operas, wrote: "Liszt's themes  stick out like almonds in a Dundee cake: they fail to cohere" (whatever was he listening with?), while the pious principal of the Royal Academy of Music, Sir George Macfarren, declared that "Liszt was working a great evil upon music". 
 

Germany, the critic James Huneker observed, set the fashion for abusing Liszt. "He had too much

success for one man, and as a composer he must be made and example of....In Germany he was abused as a Magyar, in Hungary for his Teutonic tendencies, in Paris for not being French-born[...] Germany refused to see Liszt except as an ex-piano virtuoso with the morals of a fly and a perverter of art. Even the piquant triangle in his piano concerto was suspected as possibly suggesting the usual situation of a French comedy." Howard agrees: "It was jealousy. They couldn't bar the bounties that God had bestowed upon him. He was handsome-- which is more than you can say for almost all others-- he made a fortune when he was very young and which effectively allowed him to retire from performing so that he could do what he wanted to do as the a composer. And it gave him the financial freedom to help all these other musicians, including many of the people who gave him a hard time behind his back. The idea that he was some kind of charlatan is a hare that simply won't run. One of the reasons why Liszt is not held in the highest esteem is that he's very often played by musicians who shouldn't be held in highest esteem. They play Liszt as though it's some kind of cheap trick-- and when you play it like a cheap trick, it sounds like a cheap trick. You can make Liszt sound like muck-- and I don't think that's his fault. If you played a Beethoven sonata with the same carelessness with which most people approach Liszt, you'd get run out of town on a rail."