Like his contemporaries and friends – Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann, Richard Wagner – Liszt published articles, essays, critiques and books on musical life, artistic questions and aesthetic-philosophical problems. Furthermore, his writings include monographs on other composers and their works. Like most literary works of artists, Liszt’s texts also aim to promote his own view of art, to comment on the situation of art and culture and to influence cultural policy. In contrast to his colleagues, Liszt also wrote biographical texts in order to support other composers and their work. Liszt’s writing activity extends over nearly forty years (1835–72). It is highly dependent on the writing ambitions of the two most important women in his life, Marie d’Agoult (1805–76) and Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein (1819–87), because both of them took an active part in the writing of the texts.1 The following text focuses, on the one hand, on the writings of the Paris and travelling era and, on the other, on the Weimar writings, connected with the project of the ‘Neudeutsche Schule’ and Liszt’s idea of Hungarian music.