Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in C-sharp Minor

Franz Liszt was the first rock star. Not metaphorically — literally. Women threw undergarments at him during concerts. They fought over broken piano strings as souvenirs. They collected his cigar butts in jeweled lockets. One admirer reportedly retrieved his discarded coffee dregs and wore them in a vial around her neck. The phenomenon was so unprecedented that the poet Heinrich Heine coined a term for it: Lisztomania. This was in the 1840s. The screaming-at-concerts thing didn't start with the Beatles. It started with a Hungarian pianist who was too handsome for anyone's good, including his own.

The Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 is the most famous of his nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies, and it's built on a structure borrowed from the verbunkos — a Hungarian recruiting dance that alternated between a slow, mournful section called the lassan and a wild, fast section called the friska. The lassan of the Second Rhapsody is dark, brooding, harmonically adventurous. The friska is a barely controlled explosion that accelerates to the point where the pianist's hands become a blur. Liszt could play it. Most people cannot.

Liszt's hands were freakish. He had abnormally long fingers with unusually flexible joints, and he exploited this advantage shamelessly. Passages in his compositions that seem physically impossible for normal hands were, for Liszt, merely difficult. He would sit at the piano in concert, toss his hair — yes, he was doing that in the 1840s — and tear into the keyboard with a violence that routinely broke strings and once, reportedly, cracked a piano frame. He went through pianos the way drummers go through sticks.

Later in life, Liszt took minor holy orders in the Catholic Church, became an Abbé, and spent his final years teaching young pianists for free in Weimar. The rock star became a monk. His students included virtually every important pianist of the next generation, and through them, his influence extends to every pianist alive today. The Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, meanwhile, became a cartoon staple — Bugs Bunny and Tom and Jerry both performed versions — which Liszt, who always appreciated spectacle over dignity, would probably have loved.