Eleanor Perenyi’s biography is just what Liszt has long needed and deserved.

It has always been a little too easy for serious people to take Franz Liszt lightly. The preening, posturing Hungarian ham of his virtuoso days often eclipses the gifted (if uneven) composer and musical theorist and seems to confute the vein of genuine piety that ran through his life, turning a trifle varicose toward the end.

Like all of the leading nineteenth century Romantics, Liszt was a contradictory figure, at once solemn and absurd.