Print of Franz Liszt, 1841.

Long before Beatlemania, mid-nineteenth-century European audiences went wild for Franz Liszt, the Hungarian pianist/composer with shoulder-length hair. Women fought over his broken piano strings and collected his coffee dregs in glass vials. One woman retrieved Liszt’s discarded cigar stump from a gutter and encased it in a diamond-studded locket monogrammed “F.L.” To describe this phenomenon, German poet Heinrich Heine coined the term “Lisztomania.”

Liszt took the classical music world by storm. Considered the best pianist of all time by his contemporaries, Liszt essentially created the piano recital. He was the first pianist to emerge onstage from the wings, he introduced the custom of performing in profile because he didn’t want the piano to block his face, and…

Undated photo of John Cage by Anton Perich.

John Cage pushed classical music’s limits. He stuck screws and weather stripping into pianos, composed a silent piece, and chose notes at random based on ancient Chinese divination. The Ransom Center holds Cage correspondence in several different collections. These letters reveal Cage’s early efforts to establish a center for experimental music, his mushroom expertise, his friendships, and his vision for classical music. Read more about the letters of this leading figure of experimental music.