The principal task of a conductor is not to put himself in evidence but to disappear behind his functions as much as possible. We are pilots, not servants.

Together with Liszt's student Franz Servais Franz Liszt first went to Belgium where Franz Liszt gave concerts which were brilliant successes. He had introduced himself by playing Thalberg's Fantasy Op. He found it at the monastery Madonna del Rosario just outside Rome where on June 20 1863 he took up quarters in a small Spartan apartment.

He left behind an extensive and diverse body of work in which he influenced his forward-looking contemporaries and anticipated some 20th-century ideas and trends. Liszt was also a well-known and influential composer piano teacher and conductor. He was said by his contemporaries to have been the most technically advanced pianist of his age and in the 1840s he was considered by some to be perhaps the greatest pianist of all time.