"Franz Liszt (1811-86) was one of the towering personalities of the nineteenth-century Romantic movement, internationally renowned for his astonishing versatility as a pianist, for his achievements as a composer and for his glittering social life. Not only did he raise the social status of the virtuoso but, by his dramatic love affairs with a series of aristocratic women, he came to symbolize the type of romantic hero depicted in his own music and...