A Book of Liszts by John Spurling – review

What was it about Liszt that made women faint and fight each other?"My biography is more to be invented than written after the fact" – so wrote Franz Liszt, and so it has proved to be. Many interpretations of his life, some extremely thorough and scholarly (Alan Walker's) and some more imaginative yet highly entertaining (Sacheverell Sitwell's), have appeared since his death in 1886. Now, the bicentenary of his birth in 1811 brings another chance to reassess the life of this great composer, pi...

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