Family Background
As the second child of Georg Adam Liszt and Barbara Schlesak he was born in Edelstal (Nemesvölgy), a village close to the Austrian border in the Kingdom of Hungary. They lived in Marcz, (Burgenland, Kingdom of Hungary, today in Austria), Mattersburg (Nagymarton) and also Malacka (now Malacky, Slovakia).
Although his grandfather and many other ancestors were Austrian, his father was in service for the Hungarian Nikolaus II, Prince Esterházy and they could call themselves Hungarians as citizens, but their home language was Austrian German and they lived mostly in German speaking parts of Hungary. Adam and his family could not use the Hungarian language more than rudimentally, like many others, and his son, Franz Liszt, tried to learn it only when it became compulsory in the 1870s, without success, in spite of his great language skills. In the youth Adam changed his Austrian surname "List" to the spelling "Liszt", according to Hungarian pronunciation. In his lifetime, Latin, not Hungarian, was the administrative language of the multi-ethnic Kingdom of Hungary, hence the recorded latinised name "Adamus". After the great success of his son Franz, the father Georg also started to use the surname Liszt in the 1820s. Also other family members adapted this form, e.g. Adam's brother, Eduard, father of Franz von Liszt.
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