Next on our Liszt

This week our study of the great composers introduced us to Franz Liszt.  Unfortunately I couldn't find a book about him at the library, so we had to settle for the information included in A Young Scholar's Guide to the Composers and whatever I could find online.  Liszt is another interesting character in music history.  We learned that he was probably the first musician to do solo performances - up until that time, concerts usually consisted of several musicians playing a few pieces each, but Liszt preferred to have the stage (and presumably the applause too!) to himself.  He was also the likely inventor of benefit concerts, as he gave a number of charity concerts in Vienna, with all the proceeds going to help victims of flooding.

These are two of the pieces we enjoyed:

Piano Sonata in B Minor (excerpt)

Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 (The themes from this have been used in cartoons and films, and if you're a fan of Trans-Siberian Orchestra, as we are, you'll also recognize it from one of their Christmas CDs)

This post is linked at ~a teaching heart~ where we are keeping each other accountable for making time for music in our homeschooling!