Late in 2010, we finished the scripts for our documentary film, Liszt In The World. We were astounded by 
the wealth of materials we had gathered over the dozen years of research and travels in search of the interior life and music of Franz Liszt. While continuing to develop the script, fund raising, grant writing, and the shooting schedule, Betty came up with the brilliant idea to combine musical initiatives.
Rather quickly during the month of December, we reviewed our materials to develop a stage adaptation of the three-hour documentary film. That stage performance evolved along the lines of a musical program I have presented on-and-off for the past twenty years. The Naked Gershwin is a concert performance where I am joined by two musicians (a drummer and bassist) to form a jazz trio. We perform with a narrator who reads a script based on letters to, from, or about the fabulous Gershwins.
Staring at the script for Liszt In The World, it dawned on Betty that we could present a similar stage performance of the film as a teaser for the longer more extensive film project. Hence, The Naked Liszt was born! This stage adaptation of the film was first presented in the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall in La Jolla, California on Sunday, January 30, 2011 (click here to download the event program). It’s airing in March on UCSD-TV and UCTV and audiences around the world can view The Naked Liszt by clicking here.
But don’t confuse the genre. The Naked Liszt is only but a small sampler of the rich music, interviews, and narrative to be presented in the documentary film, Liszt In The World. We expect to premiere the film in late 2011. Keep checking this site for the latest information and progress reports.
As the New Year approached, Betty and I made our much-delayed trip to Italy to scout sites for the final episode of the film. Having read the many biographies and accounts of Liszt’s final years, his activities in and around Rome were a blur of motion. He lived in many different residences; his activities often overlapped and come down to us today as a confusion of associations, disjointed locations, sudden shifts, and seemingly long periods of inactivity. We chased after Liszt in Rome traipsing through narrow alleys, broad boulevards, and mountaintops that he frequented beginning in 1861. But it was one afternoon standing atop the Spanish Steps in the heart of Rome, that it suddenly became clear to us how Liszt intuitively framed his existence in Rome.
Still a man without a country, Franz Liszt built his world around the Spanish Steps. Just to the east a few blocks along Via Felice (renamed Via Sistina), he took his first Roman residence in an hostel for traveling priests; at the bottom of the steps (plazza di Spagna) he regularly met with his Italian colleague and student Giovanni Sgambati; his mistress and muse, Carolyn von Sayn-Wittgenstein, took an apartment a few blocks north on Via del Baubino; Caffe Greco was the meeting place for Liszt and his students to enjoy cigars and brandy; he frequently performed and taught at the Academy de Santa Cecilia within earshot of Carolyne’s windows; and, Santa Francesca Romana was an elegant apartment on the grounds of one of Rome’s most famous chapels and just a short walk from the Spanish Steps. These locations functioned as his secular abodes for music-making, hosting guests, and teaching.
Liszt simultaneously maintained several more remote and secluded dwellings to feed his spiritual life. The Dominican monastery atop Monte Mario in Rome, Madonna del Rosario, was his home for five years (1863-68). In it he maintained a small cell a few feet square with little more than a table, chair, a wooden bed, and a piano (with a missing “D”). Overlapping all of these dates, Liszt maintained an apartment more distant from the center of Rome in Tivoli. Via d’Este was then and is today a sprawling villa built along the contours of a cascade of waters. The fountains and cypresses of Villa d’Este became the subject of his most impressive piano compositions late in life.
For over four years, we have planned to spend a number of days shooting “talking head” interviews with the leading Liszt scholars in Europe. Thanks to the annual meeting of the 
2011 is the occasion of the 200th birthday of one of the most enigmatic and influential artists of the 19th century, Franz Liszt (1811-1886). Love and hated throughout most of his life, Liszt knew, shaped, and supported every emerging arts and political movement of his era. By the age of nine, young Franz Liszt was praised about across Europe as the second Mozart. However, not content with the fleeting fame of the prodigy, he sequestered himself to develop upon the foundational training he received from the greatest piano pedagogue in Europe. Carl Czerny. During a long ten-year pilgrimage across Europe, he developed what he called a “transcendental technique’ for playing the piano. Consequently, he composed and performed a piano music that reinvented conventional pianism as well as the physical and kinetic relation of the body to the piano. In his compositions and performances, no longer would music be simply two dimensional (melody and accompaniment) but enhanced to incorporate 3 or 4 dimensions of activity at the piano. His celebrated Paganini Etudes (1851) and Transcendental Etudes (1852) soon became the mainstay of the piano repertoire and altered the way other composed music for the piano.
century. Chopin commented that, “I should like to rob him of his way of rendering my own Etudes.” Indeed, through his worldwide tours, Liszt made Chopin and his music a household name. Clara Schumann spoke often of his extraordinary capabilities as a pianist; although she and her famous husband, Robert, along with Johannes Brahms, also criticized his compositions as shallow and showy. Liszt and his cohorts thought of themselves as providing the, Music of the Future.” This rivalry immediately spilled into the press and, even today, divides opinion in the concert halls, and in the major conservatories of Europe and the United States. 
During the period he was Kapellmeister Extraordinaire at Weimar (1849-1858), Liszt championed the new music and composers of the day, especially Richard Wagner and his controversial operas. Their relationship began in Paris in the 1830s and continued until their deaths in the 1880s. Liszt’s surviving daughter, Cosima (1844-1930), was the source of both immense joy and heartbreak to him. In 1857, Cosima had married his most celebrated student, Hans von Bülow (1830-1894), bore him two children before beginning and adulterous relationship with Richard Wagner who depended almost entirely on support from her famous father. Their ménage à trios was the worse kept secret in Europe and part of the amazing history of “Mad King” Ludwig, opera, and Franz Liszt. Surviving well into the 20th century, Cosima Liszt maintained Bayreuth as a monument to Wagner and participated in the rise of anti-semitism of the Nazi Party in Germany. 
borderland region between Austria and Hungary, Liszt declared himself “Hungarian” at an earlier age, although his mother-tongue was German, not Hungarian. By age 11, he was recognized as the greatest prodigy since Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and had moved to Paris with his family to pursue fame and fortune as a concert artist. He did not return to Hungary until thirty years later. He was the first artist to make world tours and at the age of 35 discontinued the life of the concert artist to devote himself to conducting the avant garde music of the day.