Which composer wrote the Hungarian Rhapsodies?

Liszt, who was also the first musician to be mobbed. Women fought over his gloves and handkerchiefs, kept his cigar stubs in lockets and had his coffee dregs bottled; the poet Heine coined the word Lisztomania in 1844 and meant it as a medical diagnosis rather than a compliment.

He essentially invented the piano recital as it now exists - one performer, alone, playing from memory, seated in profile so the audience can see the hands, in a programme of other people's music as well as his own. All of that was novel and some of it was thought outrageous. He also gave away most of the money, funding the Beethoven monument at Bonn out of his own pocket after a public subscription failed.

The Hungarian Rhapsodies have a problem, which he did not see. He believed he was collecting Hungarian peasant music; he was mostly transcribing the repertoire of urban Roma bands playing a popular style called verbunkos. Bartók, who went into the villages with a phonograph fifty years later, established the difference - so the pieces are a genuine record of nineteenth-century Roma performance, sold as something else, by a man who never learned to speak Hungarian.