Transactions. His principal works were Historiae animalium Angliae tres tractatus (1678); Historiae Conchyliorum (1685–1692), and Conchyliorum Bivalvium (1696). As a conchologist he was held in high esteem, but while he recognized the similarity of fossil mollusca to living forms, he regarded them as inorganic imitations produced in the rocks. In 1683 he communicated to the Royal Society (Phil. Trans., 1684), An ingenious proposal for a new sort of maps of countries; together with tables of sands and clays, such as are chiefly found in the north parts of England. In this essay he suggested the preparation of a soil or mineral map of the country, and thereby is justly credited with being the first to realize the importance of a geological survey. He died at Epsom on the 2nd of February 1712.
LISTON, JOHN (c. 1776–1846), English comedian, was born
in London. He made his public début on the stage at Weymouth
as Lord Duberley in The Heir-at-law. After several dismal
failures in tragic parts, some of them in support of Mrs Siddons,
he discovered accidentally that his forte was comedy, especially
in the personation of old men and country boys, in which he
displayed a fund of drollery and broad humour. An introduction
to Charles Kemble led to his appearance at the Haymarket
on the 10th of June 1805 as Sheepface in the Village
Lawyer, and his association with this theatre continued with few
interruptions until 1830. Paul Pry, the most famous of all his
impersonations, was first presented on the 13th of September
1825, and soon became, thanks to his creative genius, a real
personage. Liston remained on the stage till 1837; during his
last years his mind failed, and he died on the 22nd of March 1846.
He had married in 1807 Miss Tyrer (d. 1854), a singer and actress.
Several pictures of Liston in character are in the Garrick Club, London, and one as Paul Pry in the South Kensington Museum.
LISTON, ROBERT (1794–1847), Scottish surgeon, was born on the 28th of October 1794 at Ecclesmachan, Linlithgow, where his father was parish minister. He began the study of anatomy under Dr John Barclay (1758–1826) at Edinburgh in 1810, and soon became a skilful anatomist. After eight years’ study, he became a lecturer on anatomy and surgery in the Edinburgh School of Medicine; and in 1827 he was elected one of the surgeons to the Royal Infirmary. In 1835 he was chosen professor of clinical surgery in University College, London, and this appointment he held until his death, which occurred in London on the 7th of December 1847. Liston was a teacher more by what he did than by what he said. He taught simplicity in all operative procedures; fertile in expedients, of great nerve and of powerful frame, he is remembered as an extraordinarily bold, skilful and rapid operator. He was the author of The Elements of Surgery (1831–1832) and Practical Surgery (1837), and made several improvements in methods of amputation, and in the dressing of wounds.
LISZT, FRANZ (1811–1886), Hungarian pianist and composer,
was born on the 22nd of October 1811, at Raiding, in Hungary.
His appeal to musicians was made in a threefold capacity, and
we have, therefore, to deal with Liszt the unrivalled pianoforte
virtuoso (1830–1848); Liszt the conductor of the “music of
the future” at Weimar, the teacher of Tausig, Bülow and a host
of lesser pianists, the eloquent writer on music and musicians,
the champion of Berlioz and Wagner (1848–1861); and Liszt
the prolific composer, who for some five-and-thirty years continued
to put forth pianoforte pieces, songs, symphonic orchestral
pieces, cantatas, masses, psalms and oratorios (1847–1882). As
virtuoso he held his own for the entire period during which he
chose to appear in public; but the militant conductor and
prophet of Wagner had a hard time of it, and the composer’s
place is still in dispute. Liszt’s father, a clerk to the agent of the
Esterhazy estates and an amateur musician of some attainment,
was Hungarian by birth and ancestry, his mother an Austrian-German.
The boy’s gifts attracted the attention of certain
Hungarian magnates, who furnished 600 gulden annually for
some years to enable him to study music at Vienna and Paris.
At Vienna he had lessons in pianoforte playing from Carl Czerny
of “Velocity” fame, and from Salieri in harmony and analysis
of scores. In his eleventh year he began to play in public there,
and Beethoven came to his second concert in April 1823. During
the three years following he played in Paris, the French provinces
and Switzerland, and paid three visits to England. In Paris
he had composition lessons from Paër, and a six months’ course
of lessons in counterpoint from Reicha. In the autumn of 1825
the handsome and fascinating enfant gâté of the salons and ateliers—“La
Neuvième Merveille du monde”—had the luck to get an
operetta (Don Sancho) performed three times at the Académie
Royale. The score was accidentally destroyed by fire, but a
set of studies à la Czerny and Cramer, belonging to 1826 and
published at Marseilles as 12 Études, op. i., is extant, and shows
remarkable precocity. After the death of his father in 1828
young Liszt led the life of a teacher of the pianoforte in Paris,
got through a good deal of miscellaneous reading, and felt the
influence of the religious, literary and political aspirations of
the time. He attended the meetings of the Saint-Simonists,
lent an ear to the romantic mysticism of Père Enfantin and later
to the teaching of Abbé Lamennais. He also played Beethoven
and Weber in public—a very courageous thing in those days.
The appearance of the violinist Paganini in Paris, 1831, marks
the starting-point of the supreme eminence Liszt ultimately
attained as a virtuoso. Paganini’s marvellous technique
inspired him to practise as no pianist had ever practised before.
He tried to find equivalents for Paganini’s effects, transcribed
his violin caprices for the piano, and perfected his own technique
to an extraordinary degree. After Paganini he received a
fresh impulse from the playing and the compositions of Chopin,
who arrived in 1831, and yet another impulse of equal force
from a performance of Berlioz’s “Symphonie Fantastique,
épisode de la vie d’un artiste,” in 1832. Liszt transcribed this
work, and its influence ultimately led him to the composition
of his “Poèmes symphoniques” and other examples of orchestral
programme-music.
From 1833 to 1848—when he gave up playing in public—he was greeted with frantic applause as the prince of pianists. Five years (1835–1840) were spent in Switzerland and Italy, in semi-retirement in the company of Madame la comtesse d’Agoult (George Sand’s friend and would-be rival, known in literary circles as “Daniel Stern,” by whom Liszt had three children, one of them afterwards Frau Cosima Wagner): these years were devoted to further study in playing and composition, and were interrupted only by occasional appearances at Geneva, Milan, Florence and Rome, and by annual visits to Paris, when a famous contest with Thalberg took place in 1837. The enthusiasm aroused by Liszt’s playing and his personality—the two are inseparable—reached a climax at Vienna and Budapest in 1839–1840, when he received a patent of nobility from the emperor of Austria, and a sword of honour from the magnates of Hungary in the name of the nation. During the eight years following he was heard at all the principal centres—including London, Leipzig, Berlin, Copenhagen, St Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Constantinople, Lisbon and Madrid. He gained much money, and gave large sums in charity. His munificence with regard to the Beethoven statue at Bonn made a great stir. The subscriptions having come in but sparsely, Liszt took the matter in hand, and the monument was completed at his expense, and unveiled at a musical festival conducted by Spohr and himself in 1845. In 1848 he settled at Weimar with Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein (d. 1887), and remained there till 1861. During this period he acted as conductor at court concerts and on special occasions at the theatre, gave lessons to a number of pianists, wrote articles of permanent value on certain works of Berlioz and the early operas of Wagner, and produced those orchestral and choral pieces upon which his reputation as a composer mainly depends. His ambition to found a school of composers as well as a school of pianists met with complete success on the one hand and partial failure on the other. His efforts on behalf of Wagner, who was then an exile in Switzerland, culminated in the first performance of Lohengrin on the 28th of August 1850, before a special audience assembled from far and near. Among the works produced for the first time or rehearsed with a view to the furtherance of musical art were
