Liszt was also a well-known and influential composer, piano teacher and conductor. He was a benefactor to other composers, including

,

,

,

and

.

The largest and best-known portion of Liszt's music is his original piano work. His thoroughly revised masterwork, "

" ("Years of Pilgrimage") includes arguably his most provocative and stirring pieces.

This set of three suites ranges from the virtuosity of the Suisse Orage (Storm) to the subtle and imaginative visualizations of artworks by

and

in the second set. "Années" contains some pieces which are loose transcriptions of Liszt's own earlier compositions; the first "year" recreates his early pieces of "Album d'un voyageur", while the second book includes a resetting of his own song transcriptions once separately published as "Tre sonetti di Petrarca" ("Three sonnets of Petrarch"). The relative obscurity of the vast majority of his works may be explained by the immense number of pieces he composed, and the level of technical difficulty which was present in much of his composition.