Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum: Liszt's Last Home
Why is it significant?
Find the corner of Andrássy út and Vörösmarty utca and look at the handsome neo-Renaissance building with its row of tall first-floor windows. On the first floor, behind those tall windows, Franz Liszt had his apartment.
Key Facts
| Place | Liszt Ferenc Memorial Museum: Liszt's Last Home |
|---|---|
| Address | Vörösmarty utca 35, 1064 Budapest, Hungary |
| Geo Coordinates | 47.50720, 19.06650 |
| Part of Walk | Budapest's Musical Boulevard: Andrássy Avenue from the Opera to Heroes' Square |
| Generated | Generated |
Find the corner of Andrássy út and Vörösmarty utca and look at the handsome neo-Renaissance building with its row of tall first-floor windows. On the first floor, behind those tall windows, Franz Liszt had his apartment. The rooms are still there, with his pianos, his furniture and a few small objects that tell you more about the man than any portrait.
This was the first real home of the Academy of Music, built in the late 1870s. Liszt, as president, was given a flat above the classrooms, and from 1881 he lived here during his Budapest months. He was born in 1811 in a village then in the Kingdom of Hungary, now in Austria, and he grew up speaking German and French. He never really mastered Hungarian, yet he insisted all his life that he was Hungarian.
Inside, you can see several of his pianos, his desk and his books, and one object that sums him up: a silent keyboard for practising on the road. The greatest pianist of the century carried a dumb piano so that he could keep his fingers working in a carriage or a hotel room. Liszt called his late life a life split in three, between Rome, Weimar and Budapest, and he moved between them constantly.
Picture an evening here in the 1880s. An old man in a cassock, for Liszt had taken minor orders in the Church, sitting at the piano while students crowded the room. He taught for free. He would listen, interrupt, sit down and play a passage himself, and the young pianists would remember those minutes for the rest of their lives.
He left this flat for the last time in 1886 and died that summer in Bayreuth, where he had gone to hear his son-in-law Wagner's operas, and he is buried there, not in Budapest. The museum opened in his rooms in 1986, a hundred years after his death. Keep going up Andrássy út; the houses grow grander and the avenue widens into a circle framed by four curved palaces.