‘Hungarian composer, pianist and teacher’: the first line in the current Grove online article bows to a long tradition of affixing a single national identity to composers as a shorthand for their geographical origins, citizenship or ethnic group identity. In a similar way, the travel guide Austria.info counts Liszt among ‘Austria’s “great” sons and daughters’, rationalised on the grounds of birthplace and regional geography.1 To depart from tidier lexical norms and define Liszt as a cosmopolitan-nationalist, French-educated Austro-German-Hungarian Catholic (who declared himself a Magyar) is, of course, still extremely reductive. But it gets us closer to a far messier and more interesting relationship between childhood memories of a native land, several adopted homes, changing languages, several political versions of national identity, his private sense of belonging and public participation in and promotion of national projects. It forces us to think again and again about the meaning of the ‘national’ in his music.