During his formative years as a child prodigy, well before his “transcendental” breakthroughs in the realm of virtuosity in the late 1830s and early 1840s, Franz Liszt made his mark on music through his amazing improvisations, but also through the performance of a select group of works for piano and orchestra that were considered to be the pinnacle of piano virtuosity in their day. Superseding Beethoven's mighty “Emperor” Concerto, op. 73, premiered only a decade prior but already “outmoded,” these works— Hummel's Piano Concertos in A Minor, op. 85, and B Minor, op. 89, and Weber's Konzertstück, op. 79 —were the epitome of what is now called the “brilliant style,” the postclassical (as Jim Samson terms it) approach to virtuosity that flourished in the 1820s. In fact, the two Hummel concertos were published, and the Weber piece composed, during the same year, 1821.

In 1822, Liszt was placed under the tutelage of Beethoven's student Carl Czerny, himself a prolific exponent of the brilliant style. After ten months, Czerny allowed the eleven-year-old phenomenon to make his Viennese debut with Hummel's A-Minor Concerto, creating a sensation. A reviewer in the Allgemeine Zeitung enthused, “A young virtuoso has, as it were, fallen from the clouds, and compels us to the highest admiration. The performance of this boy, for his age, borders on the incredible, and one is tempted to doubt any physical impossibility when one hears the young giant, with unabated force, thunder out Hummel's composition, so difficult and fatiguing, especially in the last movement.” The reviewer makes two important points: (1) that Hummel's concerto is especially “difficult and fatiguing” (even for adults, presumably), thereby foregrounding the extreme virtuosity of the composition itself; and (2) that the young Liszt “thunders out” the Hummel concerto with “unabated force,” an observation that most likely pertains to Liszt's specific performance, rather than to any objective quality suggested by the score. Indeed, the latter point presents a rather odd description of brilliant-style virtuosity.