Franz Liszt
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50 free Franz Liszt trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Franz Liszt was classical music's first superstar. In the 1840s he toured Europe as a pianist of almost frightening brilliance, and audiences reacted with a fervour nobody had seen at a concert before. Then, at the height of his fame, he walked away from the stage to compose, conduct and teach. This quiz follows the whole story: the Hungarian child prodigy and his teachers, the touring years and the rivals he faced, the showpieces pianists still fear, the orchestral experiments, and the tangled private life that linked him to half the great names of the Romantic era. It also covers his later years in holy orders and the places his music turns up today, from cartoons to novels. The questions begin with the facts most music lovers know and work towards details for devoted fans. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so the quiz suits a pub round, a music class or simply testing yourself.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which cartoon duo won an Oscar for The Cat Concerto, set to Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2?
Tom and Jerry
Tom and Jerry won Best Animated Short for it, their fourth Oscar in a row. Tom is the concert pianist, and Jerry, who lives inside the piano, keeps disrupting the performance.
Q 02Which word, coined by poet Heinrich Heine, names the fan frenzy at Franz Liszt's 1840s concerts?
Lisztomania
Lisztomania began in Berlin, where admirers fought over his gloves and handkerchiefs and kept his cigar stubs as souvenirs. Heine's word arrived more than a century before Beatlemania.
Q 03Which opera composer became Franz Liszt's son-in-law by marrying his daughter Cosima in 1870?
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner was less than two years younger than his new father-in-law. Liszt disapproved of the affair, broke off contact for years and learned of the wedding from the newspapers.
Q 04Franz Liszt was born in a Kingdom of Hungary village that now belongs to which modern country?
Austria
Austria took over the village of Doborján, now called Raiding, when western Hungary was handed over after the First World War. The house where he was born still stands there.
Q 05Which European capital renamed its international airport after Franz Liszt for his 200th birthday?
Budapest
Budapest had called the airport Ferihegy, after the surrounding neighbourhood, until the 2011 bicentenary. Its three-letter code is still BUD.
Q 06Which word for a solo concert was first used for Franz Liszt's 1840 London performances?
Recital
Recital entered concert language at the Hanover Square Rooms in June 1840. Until then a solo pianist normally shared the bill with singers, an orchestra or even ballet.
Q 07Which rock frontman, fresh from starring in Tommy, played Franz Liszt in a 1975 Ken Russell film?
Roger Daltrey
Roger Daltrey of the Who played the composer as the first pop star, with Ringo Starr as the Pope and a synthesiser score by Rick Wakeman of Yes.
Q 08Which violin virtuoso's 1832 concert drove Franz Liszt to practise up to fourteen hours a day?
Niccolò Paganini
Niccolò Paganini made the 20-year-old vow to become as great on the keyboard as the Italian was on four strings. Liszt later turned six of his showpieces into piano études.
Q 09Which great composer is said to have kissed the boy Franz Liszt's forehead after a Vienna concert?
Ludwig van Beethoven
Ludwig van Beethoven's supposed kiss in 1823 became the legend of an artistic christening for the 11-year-old, though historians still debate how much of the story is true.
Q 10Which music director of the Vienna imperial court gave the young Franz Liszt lessons in composition?
Antonio Salieri
Antonio Salieri, best known today as Mozart's rival in the film Amadeus, was in his seventies when the boy's improvising and sight-reading won him over.
Q 11Franz Liszt began a biography of which fellow pianist-composer within a month of the man's funeral?
Frédéric Chopin
Frédéric Chopin's sister found the timing insensitive and refused to help, so the book that appeared in 1852 contained several factual errors.
Q 12Which Franz Liszt étude, built on a violin concerto's finale, is famous for two-octave right-hand leaps?
La campanella
La campanella means 'the little bell': the tune copies a handbell that rang in the concerto's finale, and Liszt turns its chimes into leaps played at speed.
Q 13Which famous Franz Liszt piano nocturne began as a song setting a poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath?
Liebestraum No. 3
Q 21Which Viennese teacher, famous for his piano exercises, taught the young Franz Liszt free of charge?
Carl Czerny
Carl Czerny at first refused to take the boy on, then taught him for nothing for eighteen months, until he felt he had nothing more to teach.
Q 22In which Bavarian town did Franz Liszt die while attending the opera festival run by his daughter?
Bayreuth
Bayreuth is also where he lies buried: his daughter insisted on it, and despite controversy over the choice of resting place, the body was never moved.
Q 23After taking minor Catholic orders in Rome, Franz Liszt was often addressed by which title?
Abbé
Abbé Liszt had already moved into a spartan monastery apartment outside the city, with a piano in his cell, a startling turn for the former idol of the concert hall.
Liebestraum No. 3 is the last of three 'Dreams of Love', all first written as songs; its poem urges the reader to love for as long as they can.
Q 14Which one-movement orchestral form built around a story is Franz Liszt credited with creating?
Symphonic poem
Symphonic poem was his own label for thirteen such works, and the idea spread across Europe to Smetana, Sibelius and Richard Strauss.
Q 15Which teaching format, with each pupil playing while the others watch, did Franz Liszt pioneer?
Masterclass
Masterclass sessions let him hear some twenty pupils in a four-hour sitting, and he never charged any of them a fee.
Q 16In which German city did Franz Liszt settle as court music director after quitting concert tours?
Weimar
Weimar became a hub of modern music under him: he conducted new operas there, taught a generation of pianists and wrote his major orchestral works.
Q 17In Franz Liszt's first Mephisto Waltz, the devil seizes a fiddle and whips up dancers at which event?
A village wedding
A village wedding at an inn is the setting, borrowed from Nikolaus Lenau's verse Faust; the playing is so seductive that Faust waltzes a village beauty out into the woods.
Q 18Which medieval epic poem inspired a Liszt symphony with movements named Inferno and Purgatorio?
The Divine Comedy
The Divine Comedy has a third part, Paradise, but Liszt was persuaded that no earthly composer could depict its joys, so he closed with a gentle choral Magnificat instead.
Q 19Which Viennese composer's Ave Maria and Schwanengesang songs did Liszt arrange for solo piano?
Franz Schubert
Franz Schubert's songs were a lifelong love: Liszt was still playing his Ave Maria arrangement to young musicians in Rome a few months before his own death.
Q 20Why did the Paris Conservatoire refuse the boy Franz Liszt despite a letter from Metternich?
He was a foreigner
He was a foreigner, and director Luigi Cherubini would not bend the rule even for a famous prodigy, so Liszt took private lessons from Anton Reicha and Ferdinando Paer instead.
Q 24Which French composer had Franz Liszt as a witness at his wedding to the actress Harriet Smithson?
Hector Berlioz
Hector Berlioz went ahead although his friend had cautioned him against the match. The two had first met the day before the premiere of the Symphonie fantastique.
Q 25Franz Liszt's Faust Symphony paints three character portraits from a drama by which German writer?
Goethe
Goethe's Faust, his beloved Gretchen and the tempter each get a movement, and the tempter has no tune of his own: he only twists Faust's themes into sneering distortions.
Q 26Which percussion instrument's prominent part led a critic to mock Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1?
Triangle
Triangle strokes open the third movement, and the conservative critic Eduard Hanslick sneered that the whole work was a 'Triangle Concerto'.
Q 27For the 1867 coronation of which Habsburg ruler as King of Hungary did Liszt compose a Mass?
Franz Joseph I
Franz Joseph I was crowned alongside his wife Elisabeth, better known as Sisi. Liszt added two further sections to the Mass after the ceremony.
Q 28Which young French composer heard Franz Liszt play in Rome and likened his pedalling to breathing?
Claude Debussy
Claude Debussy was 23 and living at the Villa Medici as a prize student. Liszt played him a rippling piece about a spring, a sound-world his own piano music would later explore.
Q 29Which young composer's piano concerto in A minor did Franz Liszt sight-read from manuscript in Rome?
Edvard Grieg
Edvard Grieg, then 26, watched him play it at sight before an audience of musicians and left with warm praise, plus a suggested trumpet tune that he later took back out.
Q 30Which musicians, heard in the countryside of his childhood, shaped Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies?
Romani bands
Romani bands impressed him so much that he wrote a book crediting them with a large share of Hungary's native music, a claim Hungarians hotly disputed.