The extraordinary career of Franz Liszt (1811 86) as a composer, conductor, and virtuoso pianist whose incomparable skill and personal charisma dazzled audiences all over Europe, from London and Paris to Berlin, Moscow, and even Constantinople made him the nineteenth-century equivalent of a modern international pop star. In the spirit of Liszt s own innovative compositions and sparkling piano transcriptions of other composers work, John Spurling here takes up the ambitious task of writing a fictionalized biography of Liszt s life.

Liszt himself once said, My biography is more to be...