Adam Liszt

Adamus List - (Ádám Liszt) (16 December 1776 – 28 August 1827) was the father of composer and pianist Franz Liszt.

As the second child of Georg Adam List and Katharina née Baumann he was born in Edelstal (Nemesvölgy), a village close to the Austrian border in the Kingdom of Hungary. His family was partly of Danube Swabian German descent. See Life of Franz Liszt. There are germanic, slavic and magyar claims of the Liszt family. They lived in Marcz, (Burgenland, Kingdom of Hungary, today in Austria), Mattersburg (Nagymarton) and also Malacka (now Malacky, Slovakia).

Georg was in service for the Hungarian Nikolaus II, Prince Esterházy and both he and his son, Adam, were Hungarian citizens. The family lived mostly in the German speaking parts of Hungary, which is why they had only rudimentary knowledge of Hungarian. Franz tried to learn the common tongue of his kingdom only when it became compulsory in the 1870s, but in spite of his great language skills he couldn't reach a fluent level.

In his youth Adam changed his surname "List" to the spelling "Liszt", according to Hungarian pronunciation. In his lifetime, Latin, not Hungarian, was the administrative language of the multi-ethnic Kingdom of Hungary, hence the recorded Latinised name "Adamus". After the great success of his son Franz, the father Georg also started to use the surname Liszt in the 1820s. Other family members also adapted this form, e.g. Adam's brother, Eduard, father of Franz von Liszt.

As a teenager, he played cello in the House of Eszterházy summer orchestra under the direction of Joseph Haydn. He was also an amateur pianist, and played the organ and violin and sang in a choir. His brother Eduard and one sister Barbara also showed great musical talents, as did their father Georg, who worked as an organist and played the piano and violin, but they had few resources for musical education other than within the family. After graduating from the Archigymnasium Regium Posoniense (today Gamča) in Pressburg (Bratislava), Adam entered the Franciscan Order, but two years later, by his petition in 1797, was released from the order. Adam still kept a close relationship with the order, which probably gave him the inspiration to name his son Franz.

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