For the virtuoso, musical works are in fact nothing but tragic and moving materializations of his emotions; he is called upon to make them speak, weep, sing and sigh, to recreate them in accordance with his own consciousness. In this way he, like the composer, is a creator, for he must have within himself those passions that he wishes to bring so intensely to life.

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.