IIA FAMOUS FRIENDSHIP

Liszt, about 1850

Caroline de Saint-Criq had married like the dutiful daughter she was, and Liszt's heart by 1844 was not only battle-scarred but a cemetery of memories. She died in 1874. They had corresponded for years, and at the moment of their youthful parting, caused by a cruel and extremely sensible father, they made a promise to recall each other's names at the hour of the daily angelus. Liszt averred that he kept his promise. The name of the lyric he wrote for her is: "Je voudrais m'évanouir comme la pourpre du soir" ("Ich möchte hingehn wie das Abendrot").

Before the affair began with the Countess d'Agoult, afterward the mother of his three children, Liszt enjoyed an interlude with the Countess Adèle Laprunarède. It was the year of the revolution, 1830, and the profound despondency into which he had been cast by his unhappy love for Caroline was cured, as his mother sagely remarked, by the sound of cannon. He became a fast friend of Countess Adèle and followed her to her home in the Alps, there, as he jestingly said, to pursue their studies in style in the French language. It must not be forgotten that the Count, her husband, was their companion. But Paris wagged its myriad tongues all the same. Liszt's affiliation with Countess Louis Plater, born Gräfin Brzostowska, thePani Kasztelanowa(or lady castellan in English; no wonder he wrote such chromatic music later, these dissonantalnames must have been an inspiration) was purely platonic, as were the majority of his friendships with the sex. But he dearly loved a princess, and the sharp eyes of Miss Amy Fay noted that his bow when meeting a woman of rank was a trifle too profound. (See her admirable Music Study in Germany.) The truth is that Liszt was a courtier. He was reared in aristocratic surroundings, and he took to luxury as would a cat. With the cannon booming in Paris he sketched the plan of his Revolutionary Symphony, but he continued to visit the aristocracy. In 1831 at Stuttgart his friend Frédéric Chopin wrote a "revolutionary" study (in C minor, opus 10) on hearing of Warsaw's downfall. Wagner rang incendiary church bells during the revolutionary days at Dresden in May 1849. Brave gestures, as our French friends would put it, and none the less lasting. Liszt's symphony is lost, but its themes may have bobbed up in his Faust and Dante symphonies. Who remembers the Warsaw of 1831 except Chopin lovers? And the rebellious spirit of Wagner's bell-ringing passed over into his Tetralogy. Nothing is negligible to an artist, not even a "gesture." Naturally there is no reference to the incident in his autobiography. If you are to take Wagner at his word he was a mere looker-on in Dresden during what Bakounine contemptuously called "a petty insurrection." Nietzsche was right—great men are to be distrusted when they write of themselves.

With the Madame d'Agoult and Princess Wittgenstein episodes we are not concerned just now. So much has been written in this two-voiced fugue in the symphony of Liszt's life that it is difficult to disentangle the truth from the fable. La Mara is sympathetic, though not particularly enlightening. Of more interest, because of the comparative mystery of the affair, is the friendship between George Sand and Liszt. Naturally La Mara, sentimentalist that she is, denies a liaison. She errs. There was a brief love passage. But Liszt escaped the fate of De Musset and Chopin. Balzac speaks of the matter in his novel Béatrix, in which George Sand is depicted as Camille Maupin, the Countess d'Agoult as Béatrix, Gustave Planché as Claude Vignon, and Liszt as Conti. Furthermore, the D'Agoult was jealous of Madame Sand, doubly jealous of her as a friend of Liszt and as a writer of genius. Read the D'Agoult's novel, written after her parting with Liszt, and see how in this Nélida she imitates theElle et Lui. That she hated George Sand, after a pretended friendship, cannot be doubted; we have her own words as witnesses. In My Literary Life, by Madame Edmond Adam (Juliette Lamber), she said of George Sand to the author: "Her lovers are to her a piece of chalk, with which she scratches on the black-board. When she has finished she crushes the chalk under her foot, and there remains but the dust, which is quickly blown away." "How is it, my esteemed and beloved friend, you havenever forgiven?" sadly asked Madame Adam. "Because the wound has not healed yet. Conscious that I had put my whole life and soul into my love for Liszt she tried to take him away from me."

One would suppose from the above that Liszt was faithful to Madame d'Agoult or that George Sand had separated the runaway couple, whereas in reality Liszt knew George Sand before he met the D'Agoult. What Madame Sand said of Liszt as a gallant can hardly be paraphrased in English. She was not very flattering. Perhaps George Sand was a reason why the relations between Chopin and Liszt cooled; the latter said: "Our lady loves had quarrelled, and as good cavaliers we were in duty bound to side with them." Chopin said: "We are friends, we were comrades." Liszt told Dr. Niecks: "There was a cessation of intimacy, but no enmity. I left Paris soon after, and never saw him again." It was at the beginning of 1840 that Liszt went to Chopin's apartment accompanied by a companion. Chopin was absent. On his return he became furious on learning of the visit. No wonder. Who was the lady in the case? It could have been Marie, it might have been George Sand, and probably it was some new fancy.

After an oil painting by J. DanhauserVictor Hugo Paganini RossiniDumas George Sand Countess d'AgoultLiszt at the Piano

More adventurous were Liszt's affairs with Marguerite Gautier, the lady of the camellias, the consumptive heroine of the Dumas play, as related by Jules Janin, and with the more notorious Lola Montez, who had to leave Munichto escape the wrath of the honest burghers. The king had humoured too much the lady's extravagant habits. She fell in love with Liszt, who had parted with his Marie in 1844, and went with him to Constantinople. Where they separated no one knows. It was not destined to be other than a fickle passion on both sides, not without its romantic aspects for romantically inclined persons. Probably the closest graze with hatred and revenge ever experienced by Liszt was the Olga Janina episode. Polish and high born, rich, it is said, she adored Liszt, studied with him, followed him from Weimar to Rome, from Rome to Budapest, bored him, shocked him as an abbé and scandalised ecclesiastical Rome by her mad behaviour; finally she attempted to stab him, and, failing, took a dose of poison. She didn't die, but lived to compose a malicious and clever book,Souvenirs d'une Cosaque(written at Paris and Karentec, March to September, published by theLibraire Internationale, 1875, now out of print), and signed "Robert Franz." Poor old Liszt is mercilessly dissected, and his admiring circle at Weimar slashed by a vigourous pen. In truth, despite the falsity of the picture, Olga Janina wrote much more incisively, with more personal colour and temperament, than did Countess d'Agoult, who also caricatured Liszt in her Nélida (as "Guermann"), and the good Liszt wrote to his princess: "Janina was not evil, only exalted." [I have heard it whispered that the attempt on Liszt's life at Romewas a melodramatic affair, concocted by his princess, who was jealous of the Janina girl, with the aid of the pianist's valet.]

La Mara shows to us twenty-six portraits in her Liszt and the Ladies; they include Princess Cristina Belgiojoso, Pauline Viardot-Garcia, Caroline Unger-Sabatier, Marie Camille Pleyel, Charlotte von Hagn, Bettina von Arnim, Marie von Mouchanoff-Kalergis, Rosalie, Countess Sauerma, a niece of Spohr and an accomplished harp player; the Grand Duchess of Saxony, Maria Pawlowna, and her successor, Sophie, Grand Duchess of Weimar, both patronesses of Liszt; the Princess Wittgenstein, Emilie Merian-Genast, Agnes Street Klindworth, Jessie Hillebrand Laussot, Sofie Menter, the greatest of his women pupils; the Countess Wolkenstein and Bülow, Elpis Melena, Fanny, the Princess Rospigliosi, the Baroness Olga Meyendorff (this lady enjoyed to an extraordinary degree the confidence of Liszt. At Weimar she was held in high esteem by him—and hated by his pupils), and Nadine Helbig—Princess Nadine Schahawskoy. Madame Helbig was born in 1847 and went to Rome the first time in 1865. She became a Liszt pupil and a fervent propagandist. Her crayon sketch drawing of the venerable master is excellent. In her possession is a drawing by Ingres, who met Liszt in Rome, 1839, when the pianist was twenty-eight years of age. We learn that Liszt never attempted "poetry" with the exception of a couplet which he sent to the egregiousBettina von Arnim. It runs thus, and it consoles us with its crackling consonants for the discontinuance of further poetic flights on the part of its creator:

"Ich kraxele auf der LeiterUnd komme doch nicht weiter."

The perennial interest of the world in the friendships of famous men and women is proved by the never-ceasing publication of books concerning them. Of George Sand and her lovers how much has been written. George Eliot and Lewes, Madame de Récamier and Chateaubriand, Goethe and his affinities, Chopin and George Sand, Liszt and the Countess d'Agoult, Wagner and Mathilde—a voluminous index might be made of the classic and romanticliaisonsthat have excited curiosity from the time when the memory of man runneth not to the contrary down to yesteryear. Although Franz Liszt, great piano virtuoso, great composer, great man, has been dead since 1886, and the Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein since 1887, volumes are still written about their friendship. Indeed, in any collection of letters written by Liszt, or to him, the name of the princess is bound to appear. She was the veritable muse of the Hungarian,and when her influence upon him as a composer is considered it will not do to say, as many critics have said, that she was a stumbling-block in his career. The reverse is the truth.

The most recent contributions to Liszt literature are the letters between Franz Liszt and Carl Alexander, Archduke of Weimar;Aus der Glanzzeit der Weimarer Altenburg, by the fecund La Mara; and Franz Liszt, by August Göllerich, a former pupil of the master. To this we might add the little-known bundle of letters by Adelheid von Schorn,Franz Liszt et la Princesse de Sayn-Wittgenstein, (translated into French), a perfect mine of gossip. Miss von Schorn remained in Weimar after the princess left the Athens-on-the-Ilm for Rome and corresponded with her, telling of Liszt's doings, never failing to record new flirtations and making herself generally useful to the venerable composer. When attacked by his last illness at Colpach, where he had gone to visit Munkacszy, the painter, Miss von Schorn went to Bayreuth to look after him. There, at the door of his bed-chamber, she was refused admittance, Madame Cosima Wagner, through a servant, telling her that the daughter and grand-daughters of Franz Liszt would care for him. The truth is that Madame Wagner had always detested the Princess Wittgenstein and saw in the Weimar lady one of her emissaries. Miss Von Schorn left Bayreuth deeply aggrieved. After Liszt's death her correspondence with the princess abruptlyceased. She tells all this in her book. Even Liszt had shown her his door at Weimar several years before he died. He detested gossips and geese, he often declared.

The interest displayed by the world artistic has always centred about the episode of the projected marriage between the princess and Liszt. A dozen versions of the interrupted ceremony have been printed. Bayreuth, which never loved Weimar—that is, the Wagner family and the Wittgenstein faction—has said some disagreeable things, not hesitating to insinuate that Liszt himself was more pleased than otherwise when Pope Pius IX forbade the nuptials. Liszt biographers side with their idol—who once said of his former son-in-law, Hans von Bülow, that he had no talent as a married man. He might have lived to repeat the epigram if he had married the princess. Decidedly, Liszt was not made for stepping in double-harness.

Liszt, the most fascinating pianist in Europe, had been the most pursued male on the Continent, and his meeting with the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein at Kieff, Russia, in February, 1847, was really his salvation. He was then about thirty-six years old, in all the glory of his art and of his extraordinary virility. The princess, who was born in 1819, was living on her estate at Woronice, on the edge of the Russian steppes. She was nevertheless of Polish blood, the daughter of Peter von Iwanowski, a rich landowner, and of Pauline Podoska, an original, eccentric,cultivated woman and a traveller. In 1836 she married the Prince Nikolaus Sayn-Wittgenstein, a Russian millionaire and adjutant to the Czar. It was from the first a miserable failure, this marriage. The bride, intellectual, sensitive, full of the Polish love of art, above all of music, could not long endure the raw dragoon, dissipated gambler and hard liver into whose arms she had been pushed by her ambitious father. She made a retreat to Woronice with her infant daughter and spent laborious days and nights in the study of philosophy, the arts, sciences, and religion. The collision of two such natures as Carolyne and Liszt led to some magnificent romantic and emotional fireworks.

We learn in reading the newly published letters between Liszt and the Grand Duke Carl Alexander of Weimar that the pianist had visited Weimar for the first time in 1841. The furore he created was historic. The reigning family—doubtless bored to death in the charming, placid little city—welcomed Liszt as a distraction. The Archduchess Maria Pawlovna, the sister of the Czar of Russia and mother of the later Kaiserin Augusta, admired Liszt, and so did the Archduke Carl. He was covered with jewels and orders. The upshot was that after a visit in 1842 Liszt was invited to the office of General Music Director of Weimar. This offer he accepted and in 1844 he began his duties. Carl Alexander had married the Princess Sophie of Holland, and therefore Liszt had a strong partyin his favour at court. That he needed royal favour will be seen when we recall that in 1850 he produced an opera by a banished socialist, one Richard Wagner, the opera Lohengrin. He also needed court protection when in 1848 he brought to Weimar the runaway wife of Prince Wittgenstein. The lady placed herself under the friendly wing of Archduchess Maria Pawlovna, who interceded in vain with the Czar in behalf of an abused, unhappy woman. Nikolaus Wittgenstein began divorce proceedings. His wife was ordered back to her Woronice estate by imperial decree. She refused to go and her fortune was greatly curtailed by confiscation. She loved Liszt. She saw that in the glitter of this roving comet there was the stuff out of which fixed stars are fashioned, and she lived near him at Weimar from 1848 to 1861.

This was the brilliant period of musical Weimar. The illusion that the times of Goethe and Schiller were come again was indulged in by other than sentimental people. Princess Carolyne held a veritable court at the Altenburg, a large, roomy so-called palazzo on the Jena post-road, just across the muddy creek they call the River Ilm. The present writer when he last visited Weimar found the house very much reduced from its former glories. It looked commonplace and hardly like the spot where Liszt wrote his symphonic poems, planned new musical forms and the reformation of church music; where came Berlioz, Thackeray, George Eliot, and GeorgeHenry Lewes, not to mention a number of distinguished poets, philosophers, dramatists, composers, and aristocratic folk. Carolyne corresponded with all the great men of her day, beginning with Humboldt. The idea of the Goethe Foundation was born at that time. It was a veritable decade of golden years that Weimar lived; but there were evidences about 1858 that Liszt's rule was weakening, and after the performance of his pupil's opera, The Barber of Bagdad, by Peter Cornelius, December 15, 1858, he resigned as Kapellmeister. Dinglested's intrigues hurt his unselfish nature and a single hiss had disturbed him into a resignation. The daughter of Princess Wittgenstein married in 1859 Prince Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, and in 1861 the Altenburg was closed and the princess went to Rome to see the Pope.

At the Vatican the princess was well received. She was an ardent Catholic and was known to be an author of religious works. Pius IX bade her arise when she fell weeping at his feet asking for justice. She presented her case. She had been delivered into matrimony at the age of seventeen, knowing nothing of life, of love, of her husband. Wouldn't his Holiness dissolve the original chains so that she could marry the man of her election? The Pope was amiable. He knew and admired Liszt. He had the matter investigated. After all it was an enforced marriage to a heretic, this odious Wittgenstein union; and then came the desired permission. Carolyne,Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, born Ivanovska, was a free woman. Delighted, she lost no time; Liszt was told to reach Rome by the evening of October 21, 1861, the eve of his fiftieth birthday. The ceremony was to take place at the Church of San Carlo, on the Corso, at 6A. M.of October 22.

What really happened the night of the 21st after Liszt arrived no one truly knows but the principals. Lina Ramann tells her tale, La Mara hers, Göllerich his; Eugen Segnitz in his pamphlet,Franz Liszt und Rom, has a very conservative account; but they all concur if not in details at least in the main fact, that powerful, unknown machinery was set in motion at the Vatican, that the Holy Father had rescinded his permission pending a renewed examination of the case. The blow fell at the twelfth hour. The church was decorated and a youth asked the reason for all the candles and bravery of the altars. He was told that Princess Wittgenstein was to marry "her piano player" the next morning. The news was brought by the boy to his father, M. Calm-Podoska, a cousin of Carolyne, who, with the aid of Cardinal Catarani and the Princess Odescalchi, begged a hearing at the Vatican. Cardinal Antonelli sent the messenger bearing the fatal information. The princess was as one dead. It was the end of her earthly ambitions.

How did Liszt bear the disappointment? At this juncture the fine haze of legend intervenes. His daughter Cosima has said (in a number oftheBayreuther Blätter) that he had left Weimar for Rome remarking that he felt as if going to a funeral. Other and malicious folk have pretended to see in the melodramatic situation the fine Hungarian hand of Liszt. He was glad, so it was averred, to get rid of the marriage and the princess at the same stroke of the clock. Had she not been nicknamed"Fürstin Hinter-Liszt"because of the way she followed him from town to town when he was giving concerts? But Antonelli was a friend of the princess as well as an intimate of Liszt. We doubt not that Liszt came to Rome in good faith. In common with the princess he accepted the interruption as a sign from on high, and even when in 1864 Prince Wittgenstein died the marriage idea was not seriously revived. Carolyne asked Liszt to devote his genius to the Church. In 1865 he assumed minor orders and became an abbé.

Pius IX, a lover of music, had on July 11, 1863, visited Liszt at the Dominican cloister of Monte Mario, and to the Hungarian's accompaniment had sung in his sweet-toned musical voice. Liszt was called his Palestrina, but alas! in the churchly music of Liszt Rome has never betrayed more than a passing interest; and to-day Pius X is ultra-Gregorian. Liszt, like a musical Moses, saw the promised land but did not enter it.

The friendship of the princess and Liszt never abated. He divided his days between Weimar, Rome, and Budapest (from 1876 in the lattercity), and she wrote tirelessly in Rome books on theology, mysticism, and Church history. She was a great and generally good force in the life of Liszt, who was, she said, a lazy, careless man, though he left over thirteen hundred compositions. Women are insatiable.

The Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein

The future bibliographer of Liszt literature has a heavy task in store for him, for books about the great Hungarian composer are multiplying apace. Liszt the dazzling virtuoso has long been a theme with variations, and is, we suspect, a theme nearly exhausted; but Liszt as tone poet, Liszt as song writer, as composer for the pianoforte, aslittérateur, the man, the wickedest of Don Juans, the ecclesiastic—these and a dozen other studies of the most protean musician of the last century have been appearing ever since the publication of Lina Ramann's vast and sentimental biography. Instead of there being a lack of material for a new book there is an embarrassment, not always of riches, from industrious pens, though few are of value. The Liszt pupils have had their say, and their pupils are beginning to intone the psalmody of uncritical praise. Liszt the romantic, magnificent, magnanimous, supernal, is set to the same old harmonies, until the reader, tired of the gabble and gush, longs for abiographer who will riddle the various legends and once and for all prove that Liszt was not perfection, even if he was the fascinating Admirable Crichton of his times.

Yet, and the fact sets us wondering over the mutability of fame, the Liszt propaganda is not flourishing. Richard Burmeister, a well known pupil and admirer of the master in Berlin has assured us that while Liszt is heard in all the concerts in Germany, the public is lukewarm; Richard Strauss is more eagerly heard. Liszt's familiar remark, "I can wait," provoked from the authority above mentioned the answer, "Perhaps he has waited too long." We are inclined to disagree with this dictum. Liszt once had musical and unmusical Europe at his feet. His success was called comet-like, probably because he was born in the comet year 1811, also because his hair was long and his technique transcendentally brilliant. His critical compositions were received with less approval. That such an artist of the keyboard could be also a successor to Beethoven was an idea mocked at by the conservative Leipsic school. Besides, he came in such a questionable guise as aSymphoniker. A piano concerto with a triangle in the score (the E flat), compositions for full orchestra which were called symphonic poems, lyrics without a tune, that pretended to follow the curve of the words; finally church music, solemn masses through which stalked the apparition of the haughty Magyar chieftain, accompanied byechoes of the gipsies on theputzta(the Graner Mass); it was too much for ears attuned to the suave, melodious Mendelssohn. Indeed the entire Neo-German school was too exotic for Germany. Berlioz, a half mad Frenchman; Richard Wagner, a crazy revolutionist, a fugitive from Saxony; and the Hungarian Liszt, half French, wholly diabolic—of such were the uncanny ingredients of the new music. And then were there not Liszt and his Princess Wittgenstein at Weimar, and the crew of pupils, courtiers and bohemians who collected at the Altenburg? Decidedly these people would never do, even though patronised by royalty. George Eliot and her man Friday, proper British persons, were rather shocked when they visited Weimar.

Liszt survived it all and enjoyed, notwithstanding the opposition of Ferdinand Hiller, Joseph Joachim, the Schumanns, later Brahms and Hanslick, the pleasure of hearing his greater works played, understood, and applauded.

Looking backward in an impartial manner it cannot be said that the Liszt compositions have unduly suffered from the proverbial neglect of genius. A Liszt orchestral number, if not imperative, is a matter of course at most symphony concerts. The piano music is done to death, especially the Hungarian Rhapsodies. Liszt has been ranged; the indebtedness of modern music to his pioneer efforts has been duly credited. We know that the Faust and Dante symphonies (which might have been called symphonicpoems) are forerunners not only of much of Wagner, but of the later group from Saint-Saëns to Richard Strauss. Why, then, the inevitable wail from the Lisztians that the Liszt music is not heard? Christus and the other oratorios and the masses might be heard oftener, and there are many of the sacred compositions yet unsung that would make some critics sit up. No, we are lovers of Liszt, but the martyrdom motive has been sounded too often. In a double sense a reaction is bound to come. The true Liszt is to emerge from the clouds of legend, and Liszt the composer will be definitely placed. A little disappointment will result in both camps; the camp of the ultra-Liszt worshippers, which sets him in line with Beethoven and above Wagner, and the camp of the anti-Lisztians, which refuses him even the credit of having written a bar of original music. How Wagner would have rapped the knuckles of these latter; how he would have told them what he wrote to Liszt: "Ich bezeichne dich als Schöpfer meiner jetzigen Stellung. Wenn ich komponiere und instrumentiere—denke ich immer nur an dich ... deine drei letzten Partituren sollen mich wieder zum Musiker weihen für den Beginn meines zweiten Aktes [Siegfried], denn dies Studium einleiten soll."

Did Wagner mean it all? At least, he couldn't deny what is simply a matter of dates. Liszt preceded Wagner. Otherwise how explain that yawning chasm between Lohengrin and Tristan?Liszt, an original stylist and a profounder musical nature than Berlioz, had intervened. Nevertheless Liszt learned much from Berlioz, and it is quite beside the mark to question the greater creative power of Wagner over both the Frenchman and the Hungarian. Wagner, like the Roman conquerors, annexed many provinces and made them his own. Let us drop these futile comparisons. Liszt was as supreme in his domain as Wagner in his; only the German had the more popular domain. His culture was intensive, that of Liszt extensive. The tragedy was that Liszt lived to hear himself denounced as an imitator of Wagner; butchered to make a Bayreuth holiday. The day after his death in 1886 the news went abroad in Bayreuth that the "father-in-law of Wagner" had died; that his funeral might disturb the success of the current music festival! Liszt, who had begun his career with a kiss from Beethoven; Liszt, whose name was a flaring meteor in the sky of music when Wagner was starving in Paris; Liszt the path-breaker, meeting the usual fate of such a Moses, who never conquered the soil of the promised land, the initiator, at the last buried in foreign soil (he loathed Bayreuth and the Wagnerians) and known as the father-in-law of the man who eloped with his daughter and had borrowed of him everything from money to musical ideas. The gods must dearly love their sport.

The new books devoted to Liszt, his life and his music, are by Julius Kapp, August Göllerich(in German), Jean Chantavoine and Calvocoressi (in French), and A. W. Gottschalg's Franz Liszt in Weimar, a diary full of reminiscences. These works, ponderous in the case of the Germans, represent the vanguard of the literature that is due the anniversary year. To M. Chantavoine may be awarded the merit of the most symmetrically told tale; however, he need not have repeated Janka Wohl's doubtfulmotattributed to Liszt apropos of priestly celibacy: "Gregory VII was a great philanthropist." This reflects on the Princess Wittgenstein, and Liszt, most chivalric of men, would never have said anything that might present her in the light of pursuing him with matrimonial designs. That she did is not to be denied. Dr. Kapp is often severe on his hero. Is any man ever a hero to his biographer? He does not glorify his subject, and for the amiable weakness displayed by Liszt for princesses and other noble dames Dr. Kapp is sharp. The compositions are fairly judged, neither in the superlative key, nor condescendingly, as being of mere historic interest. There are over thirteen hundred, of which about four hundred are original. Liszt wrote too much, although he was a better self-critic than was Rubinstein. New details of the quarrel with the Schumanns are given. The gifted pair do not emerge exactly in an agreeable light. Liszt it was who first made known the piano music of Robert Schumann. Clara Schumann, with the true Wieck provinciality, was jealous of Liszt'sinfluence over Robert. Then came the disturbing spectre of Wagner, and Schumann could not forgive Liszt for helping the music of the future to a hearing at Weimar. The rift widened. Liszt made a joke of it, but he was hurt by Schumann's ingratitude. Alas! he was to be later hurt by Wagner, by Joachim, by Brahms. He dedicated his B-minor sonata to Schumann, and Schumann dedicated to him his noble Fantaisie in C. After Schumann's death his widow brought out an edition of this fantaisie with the dedication omitted. The old-fashioned lady neither forgot nor forgave.

We consider the Kapp biography solid. The best portrait of Liszt may be found in that clever and amusing novel by Von Wolzogen, Kraftmayr. The Göllerich book chiefly consists of a chain of anecdotes in which the author is a prominent figure. Herr Kapp in a footnote attacks Herr Göllerich, denying that he was much with Liszt. How these Liszt pupils love each other! Joseffy—who was with the master two summers at Weimar, though he never relinquished his proud title of Tausig scholar—when the younger brilliant stars Rosenthal, first a Joseffy pupil, Sauer, and others cynically twitted him about his admiration of Liszt's playing—over seventy, at the time Rosenthal was with him—Joseffy answered: "He was the unique pianist." "But you were very young when you heard him" (1869), they retorted. "Yes, and Liszt was ten years younger too," replied the witty Joseffy.

Göllerich relates the story of the American girl who threw stones at the window of the Hoffgartnerei, Liszt's residence in Weimar, and when the master appeared above called out: "I've come all the way from America to hear you play." "Come up," said the aged magician, "I'll play for you." He did so, much to the scandal of the Liszt pupils assembled for daily worship. The anecdotes of Tausig and the stolen score of the Faust symphony (Liszt generously stated that the score was overlooked), are also set forth in the Göllerich book.

But he, the darling of the gods, fortune fairly pursuing him from cradle to grave, nevertheless the existence of this genius was far from happy. His closing years were melancholy. The centre of the new musical life and beloved by all, he was a lonely, homeless, disappointed man. His daughter Cosima, a dweller among memories only, said that the music of her father did not exist for her; Weimar had been swallowed by Bayreuth, and the crowning sorrow for Liszt lovers is the tomb of Liszt at Bayreuth. It should be in his beloved Weimar. He lies in the shadow of his dear friend Wagner, he, the "father-in-law of Wagner." Pascal was right; no matter the comedy, the end of life is always tragic. Perhaps if the tragedy had come to Franz Liszt earlier he might have profited by the uses of adversity, as did Richard Wagner, and thus have achieved the very stars.

When Franz Liszt nearly three quarters of a century ago made some suggestions to the Erard piano manufacturers on the score of increased sonority in their instruments, he sounded the tocsin of realism. It had been foreshadowed in Clementi's Gradus, and its intellectual resultant, the Beethoven sonata, but the material side had been hardly realised. Chopin, who sang the swan-song of idealism in surpassingly sweet tones, was by nature unfitted to wrestle with the problem. The arpeggio principle had its attractions for the gifted Pole, who used it in the most novel combinations and dared the impossible in extended harmonies. But the rich glow of idealism was over it all—a glow not then sicklied by the impertinences and affectations of the Herz-Parisian school; despite the morbidities and occasional dandyisms of Chopin's style he was, in the main, manly and sincere. Thalberg, who pushed to its limits scale playing and made an embroidered variant the end andnot a means of piano playing—Thalberg, aristocratic and refined, lacked dramatic blood. With him the well-sounding took precedence of the eternal verities of expression. Touch, tone, technique, were his trinity of gods.

Thalberg was not the path-breaker; this was left for that dazzling Hungarian who flashed his scimitar at the doors of Leipsic and drove back cackling to their nests the whole brood of old women professors—a respectable crowd, which swore by the letter of the law and sniffed at the spirit. Poverty, chastity, and obedience were the obligatory vows insisted upon by the pedants of Leipsic; to attain this triune perfection one had to become poor in imagination, obedient to dull, musty precedent, and chaste in finger exercises. What wonder, when the dashing young fellow from Raiding shouted his uncouth challenge to ears plugged by prejudice, a wail went forth and the beginning of the end seemed at hand. Thalberg went under. Chopin never competed, but stood, a slightly astonished spectator, at the edge of the fray. He saw his own gossamer music turned into a weapon of offence; his polonaises were so many cleaving battle-axes, and perforce he had to confess that all this carnage of tone unnerved him. Liszt was the warrior, not he.

Schumann did all he could by word and note, and to-day, thanks to Liszt and his followers, any other style of piano playing would seem old-fashioned. Occasionally an idealist like theunique De Pachmann astonishes us by his marvellous play, but he is a solitary survivor of a once powerful school and not the representative of an existing method. There is no gainsaying that it was a fascinating style, and modern giants of the keyboard might often pattern with advantage after the rococoisms of the idealists; but as a school pure and simple it is of the past. We moderns are as eclectic as the Bolognese. We have a craze for selection, for variety, for adaptation; hence a pianist of to-day must include many styles in his performance, but the keynote, the foundation, is realism, a sometimes harsh realism that drives to despair the apostles of the beautiful in music and often forces them to lingering retrospection. To all is not given the power to summon spirits from the vasty deep, and thus we have viewed many times the mortifying spectacle of a Liszt pupil staggering about under the mantle of his master, a world too heavy for his attenuated artistic frame. With all this the path was blazed by the Magyar and we may now explore with impunity its once trackless region.

Modern piano playing differs from the playing of fifty years ago principally in the character of touch attack. As we all know, the hand, forearm and upper arm are important factors now in tone production where formerly the fingertips were considered the prime utility. Triceps muscles rule the big tonal effects in our times. Liszt discovered their value. The Viennesepianos certainly influenced Mozart, Cramer and others in their styles; just as Clementi inaugurated his reforms by writing a series of studies and then building himself a piano to make them possible of performance. With variety of touch—tone-colour—the old rapid pearly passage, withal graceful school of Vienna, vanished; it was absorbed by the new technique. Clementi, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, forced to the utmost the orchestral development of the piano. Power, sonority, dynamic variety and novel manipulation of the pedals, combined with a technique that included Bach part playing and demanded the most sensational pyrotechnical flights over the keyboard—these were a few of the signs of the new school. In the giddiness superinduced by indulging in this heady new wine an artistic intoxication ensued that was for the moment harmful to a pure interpretation of the classics, which were mangled by the young vandals who had enlisted under Liszt's victorious standard. Colour, only colour, all the rest is but music! was the motto of those bold youths, who had never heard of Paul Verlaine.

But time has mellowed them, robbed their playing of its too dangerous quality, and when the last of the Liszt pupils gives his—or her—last recital we may wonder at the charges of exaggerated realism. Indeed, tempered realism is now the watchword. The flamboyancy which grew out of Tausig's attempt to let loose the Wagnerian Valkyrie on the keyboard has beentoned down into a more sober, grateful colouring. The scarlet waistcoat of the Romantic school is outworn; the brutal brilliancies and exaggerated orchestral effects of the realists are beginning to be regarded with suspicion. We comprehend the possibilities of the instrument and our own aural limitations. Wagner on the piano is absurd, just as absurd as were Donizetti and Rossini. A Liszt operatic transcription is as nearly obsolete as a Thalberg paraphrase. (Which should you prefer hearing, the Norma of Thalberg or the Lucia of Liszt? Both in their different ways are clever but—outmoded.) Bold is the man to-day who plays either in public.

With Alkan the old virtuoso technique ends. The nuance is ruler now. The reign of noise is past. In modern music sonority, brilliancy are present, but the nuance is inevitable, not alone tonal but expressive nuance. Infinite shadings are to be heard where before were only piano, forte, and mezzo-forte. Chopin and Liszt and Tausig did much for the nuance; Joseffy taught America the nuance, as Rubinstein revealed to us the potency of his golden tones. "Pas la couleur, rien que la nuance," sang Verlaine; and without nuance the piano is a box of wood, wire and steel, a coffin wherein is buried the soul of music.

"The remembrance of his playing consoles me for being no longer young." This sentence, charmingly phrased, as it is charming in sentiment, could have been written by no other than Camille Saint-Saëns. He refers to Liszt, and he is perhaps better qualified to speak of Liszt than most musicians or critics. His adoration is perfectly comprehensible; to him Liszt is the protagonist of the school that threw off the fetters of the classical form (only to hamper itself with the extravagances of the romantics). They all come from Berlioz, the violent protestation of Saint-Saëns to the contrary notwithstanding. However this much may be urged in the favour of the Parisian composer; a great movement like the romantic in music, painting, and literature simultaneously appeared in a half dozen countries. It was in the air and evidently catching. Goethe summed up the literary revolution in his accustomed Olympian manner, saying to Eckermann: "They all come from Chateaubriand." This is sound criticism; for in the writings of the author of Atala, and The Genius of Christianity may be found the germ-plasm of all the later artistic disorder; the fierce colour, bizarrerie, morbid extravagance, introspective analysis—which in the case of Amiel touched a brooding melancholy. Stendhal was the unwilling forerunner of the movement that captivated the sensitiveimagination of Franz Liszt, as it later undoubtedly prompted the orphic impulses of Richard Wagner.

Saint-Saëns sets great store on Liszt's original compositions, and I am sure when the empty operatic paraphrases and rhapsodies are forgotten the true Liszt will shine the brighter. How tinkling are the Hungarian rhapsodies—now become café entertainment. And how the old bones do rattle. We smile at the generation that could adore The Battle of Prague, the Herz Variations, the Kalkbrenner Fantasias, but the next generation will wonder at us for having so long tolerated this drunken gipsy, who dances to fiddle and cymbalom accompaniment. He is too loud for polite nerves. Technically, the Liszt arrangements are brilliant and effective for dinner music. One may show off with them, make much noise and a reputation for virtuosity, that would be quickly shattered if a Bach fugue were selected as a text. One Chopin Mazurka contains more music than all of the rhapsodies, which I firmly contend are but overdressed pretenders to Magyar blood. Liszt's pompous introductions, spun-out scales, and transcendental technical feats are not precisely in key with the native wood-note wild of genuine Hungarian folk-music. A visit to Hungary will prove this statement. Gustav Mahler was right in affirming that too much gipsy has blurred the outlines of real Magyar music.

I need not speak of Liszt's admirable transcriptionsof songs by Schubert, Schumann, Franz, Mendelssohn, and others; they served their purpose in making publicly known these compositions and are witnesses to the man's geniality, cleverness and charm. I wish only to speak of the compositions for solo piano composed by Liszt Ferencz of Raiding, Hungaria. Many I salute with theeljen!of patriotic enthusiasm, and I particularly delight in quizzing the Liszt-rhapsody fanatic as to his knowledge of the Etudes—those wonderful continuations of the Chopin studies—of his acquaintance with theAnnées de Pèlerinage, of theValse Oubliée, of theValse Impromptu, of the Sonnets after Petrarch, of the Nocturnes, of the F-sharp Impromptu ofAb-Irato—that étude of which most pianists never heard; of the Apparitions, the Legends, the Ballades, the brilliant Mazurka, the Elegier, theHarmonies Péstiques et Religieuses, or theConcerto Pateticoà laBurmeister, and of numerous other pieces that contain enough music to float into glory—as Philip Hale would say—a dozen composers in this decade of the new century. [It was Max Bendix who so wittily characterised the A-major concerto as "Donizetti with Orchestra." Liszt was very often Italianate.]

After a lithograph by Kriehuber in the N. Y. Public LibraryKriehuber Berlioz Czerny Liszt ErnstA Matinée at Liszt's

The eminently pianistic quality of Liszt's original music commends it to every pianist. Joseffy once said that the B-minor sonata was one of those compositions that plays itself, it lies so beautifully for the hand. For me no work ofLiszt with the possible exception of the studies, is as interesting as this same fantaisie that masquerades as a sonata in Hmoll. Agreeing with those who declare that they find few traces of the sonata form in the structure of this composition, and also with those critics who assert the word to be an organic amplification of the old, obsolete form, and that Liszt has taken Beethoven's last sonata period as a starting-point and made a plunge into futurity—agreeing with these warring factions, thereby choking off the contingency of a spirited argument, I repeat that I find the B minor of Liszt truly fascinating music.

What a tremendously dramatic work it is! It stirs the blood. It is intense. It is complex. The opening bars are truly Lisztian. The gloom, the harmonic haze, from which emerges that bold theme in octaves (the descending octaves Wagner recalled when he wrote his Wotan theme); the leap from the G to the A sharp below—how Liszt has made this and the succeeding intervals his own. Power there is, sardonic power, as in the opening phrase of the E-flat piano concerto, so cynically mocking. How incisively the composer traps your consciousness in the next theme of the sonata, with its four knocking D's. What follows is like a drama enacted in the netherworld. Is there a composer who paints the infernal, the macabre, with more suggestive realism than Liszt? Berlioz possessed the gift above all, except Liszt; Raff can compass the grisly, and also Saint-Saëns; but thin sharp flames hoverabout the brass, wood and shrieking strings in the Lisztian orchestra.

The chorale, usually the meat of a Liszt composition, now appears and proclaims the religious belief of the composer in dogmatic accents, and our convictions are swept along until after that outburst in C major, when follows the insincerity of it in the harmonic sequences. Here it surely is not a whole-heart belief but only a theatrical attitudinising; after the faint return of the opening motive is heard the sigh of sentiment, of passion, of abandonment, which engender the suspicion that when Liszt was not kneeling before a crucifix he was to a woman. He blends piety and passion in the most mystically amorous fashion; with the cantando expressivo in D, begins some lovely music, secular in spirit, mayhap intended by its creator for reredos and pyx.

But the rustle of silken attire is back of every bar; sensuous imagery, a faint perfume of femininity lurks in each cadence and trill. Ah! naughty Abbé have a care. After all thy tonsures and chorales, thy credos and sackcloth, wilt thou admit the Evil One in the guise of a melody, in whose chromatic intervals lie dimpled cheek and sunny tress! Wilt thou allow her to make away with spiritual resolutions! Vade, retro me Sathanas! And behold it is accomplished. The bold theme so eloquently proclaimed at the outset is solemnly sounded with choric pomp and power. Then the hue and cry of diminished sevenths begins, and this tonalpanorama with its swirl of intoxicating colours moves kaleidoscopically onward. Again the devil tempts the musical St. Anthony, this time in octaves and in A major; he momentarily succumbs, but that good old family chorale is repeated, and even if its orthodoxy is faulty in spots it serves its purpose; the Evil One is routed and early piety breaks forth in an alarming fugue which, like that domestic ailment, is happily short-winded. Another flank movement of the "ewig Weibliche," this time in the seductive key of B major, made mock of by the strong man of music who, in the stretta quasi presto, views his early disorder with grim and contrapuntal glee. He shakes it from him, and in the triolen of the bass frames it as a picture to weep or rage over.

All this leads to a prestissimo finale of startling splendour. Nothing more exciting is there in the literature of the piano. It is brilliantly captivating, and Liszt the Magnificent is stamped on every bar. What gorgeous swing, and how the very bases of the earth seem to tremble at the sledge-hammer blows from the cyclopean fist of this musical Attila. Then follow a few bars of that Beethoven-like andante, a moving return to the early themes, and softly the first lento descends to the subterranean caverns whence it emerged, a Magyar Wotan majestically vanishing into the bowels of a Gehenna; then a true Liszt chord-sequence and a stillness in B major. The sonata in B minor displaysall of Liszt's power and weakness. It is rhapsodic, it is too long—infernal, not "heavenly lengths"—it is full of nobility, a drastic intellectuality, and a sonorous brilliancy. To deny it a commanding position in the pantheon of piano music would be folly. And interpreted by an artist versed in the Liszt traditions, such as Arthur Friedheim, this work compasses at times the sublime.

It is not my intention to claim your attention for the remainder of the original compositions; that were indeed a terrible strain on your patience. In theAnnées de Pèlerinage, redolent of Vergilian meadows, soft summer airs shimmering through every bar, what is more delicious exceptAu Bord d'une Source? Is the latter not exquisitely idyllic? Surely in those years of pilgrimage through Switzerland, Italy, France, Liszt garnered much that was good and beautiful and without the taint of the salon or concert platform. The two Polonaises recapture the heroic and sorrowing spirit of Sarmatia. The first in E is a perennial favourite; I always hear its martial theme as a pattern reversed of the first theme in the A-flat Polonaise of Chopin. But the second Liszt Polonaise in C minor is the more poetic of the pair; possibly that is the reason why it is so seldom played.

Away from the glare of gaslight this extraordinary Hungarian aspired after the noblest things. In the atmosphere of the salons, of the Papal court, and concert room, Liszt was hardly soadmirable a character. I know of certain cries calling to heaven to witness that he was anointed of the Lord (which he was not); that if he had cut and run to sanctuary to escape two or more women we might never have heard of Liszt the Abbé. One penalty undergone by genius is its pursuit by gibes and glossaries. Liszt was no exception to this rule. Like Ibsen and Maeterlinck he has had many things read into his music, mysticism not forgotten. Perhaps the best estimate of him is the purely human one. He was made up of the usual pleasing and unpleasing compound of faults and virtues, as is any great man, not born of a book.

The Mephisto Valse from Lenau's Faust, in addition to its biting broad humour and satanic suggestiveness, contains one of the most voluptuous episodes outside of the Tristan score. That halting, languourous, syncopated, theme in D flat is marvellously expressive, and the poco allegretto seems to have struck the fancy of Wagner, who did not hesitate to appropriate motives from his esteemed father-in-law when the desire overtook him. He certainly considered Kundry Liszt-wise before fabricating her scream in Parsifal.

Liszt's life was a sequence of triumphs, his sympathies were almost boundless, yet he found time to work unfalteringly and despite myriad temptations his spiritual nature was never wholly submerged. I wish, however, that he had not invented the piano recital and the Liszt pupil.

I possess, and value as a curiosity, a copy of Liszt's Etudes, Opus 1. The edition is rare and the plates have been destroyed. Written when Liszt was fresh from the tutelage of Carl Czerny, they show decided traces of his schooling. They are not difficult for fingers inured to modern methods. When I first bought them I knew not theEtudes d'Execution Transcendentale, and when I encountered the latter I exclaimed at the composer's cleverness. The Hungarian has taken his opus 1 and dressed it up in the most bewildering technical fashion. He gave these studies appropriate names, and even to-day they require a tremendous technique to do them justice. The most remarkable of the set—the one in F minor No. 10—Liszt left nameless, and like a peak it rears its head skyward, while about it cluster its more graceful fellows:Ricordanza,Feux-follets, Harmonies du Soir (Chasse-neige, andPaysage). The Mazeppa is a symphonic poem in miniature. What a superb contribution to piano literature is Liszt's. These twelve incomparable studies, the three effectiveEtudes de Concert(several quite Chopinish in style and technique), the murmuringWaldesrauschen, the sparklingGnomenreigen, the stormyAb-Irato, the poeticAu Lac de WallenstadtandAu Bord d'une Source, have they not all tremendously developed the technical resources of the instrument?And to play them one must have fingers of steel, a brain on fire, a heart bubbling with chivalric force; what a comet-like pianist he was, this Magyar, who swept European skies, who transformed the still small voice of Chopin into a veritable hurricane. Nevertheless, we cannot imagine a Liszt without a Chopin preceding him.

But, Liszt lost, the piano would lose its most dashing cavalier; while his freedom, fantasy, and fire are admirable correctives of the platitudes of the Hummel-Czerny-Mendelssohn school. Liszt won from his instrument an orchestral quality. He advanced by great wing-strokes toward perfection, and deprived of his music we should miss colour, sonority, richness of tinting, and dramatic and dynamic contrasts. He has had a great following. Tausig was the first to feel his influence, and if he had lived longer would have beaten out a personal style of his own. Of the two we prefer Liszt's version of the Paganini studies to Schumann's. The Campanella is a favourite of well equipped virtuosi.

In my study of Chopin reference is made to Chopin's obligations to Liszt. I prefer now to quote a famous authority on the subject, no less a critic than Professor Frederick Niecks, whose biography of Chopin is, thus far, the superior of all. He writes: "As at one time all ameliorations in the theory and practice of music were ascribed to Guido of Arezzo, so it is nowadays the fashion to ascribe all improvements and extensions of the pianoforte technique to Liszt, who,more than any other pianist, drew upon himself the admiration of the world, and through his pupils continued to make his presence felt even after the close of his career as a virtuoso. But the cause of this false opinion is to be sought not so much in the fact that the brilliancy of his artistic personality threw all his contemporaries into the shade, as in that other fact, that he gathered up into one web the many threads new and old which he found floating about during the years of his development. The difference between Liszt and Chopin lies in this, that the basis of the former's art is universality, that of the latter's, individuality. Of the fingering of the one we may say that it is a system, of that of the other that it is a manner. Probably we have here also touched on the cause of Liszt's success and Chopin's want of success as a teacher."

Niecks does not deny that Liszt influenced Chopin. In volume 1 of his Frederick Chopin, he declares that "The artist who contributed the largest quotum of force to this impulse was probably Liszt, whose fiery passions, indomitable energy, soaring enthusiasm, universal tastes and capacity of assimilation, mark him out as the opposite of Chopin. But, although the latter was undoubtedly stimulated by Liszt's style of playing the piano and of writing for this instrument, it is not so certain as Miss L. Ramann, Liszt's biographer, thinks, that this master's influence can be discovered in many passages ofChopin's music which are distinguished by a fiery and passionate expression, and resemble rather a strong, swelling torrent than a gently gliding rivulet. She instances Nos. 9 and 12 ofDouze Etudes, Op. 10; Nos. 11 and 12 ofDouze Etudes, Op. 25; No. 24 ofVingt Quatre Préludes, Op. 28; Premier Scherzo, Op. 20; Polonaise in A-flat Major, Op. 32. All these compositions, we are told, exhibit Liszt's style and mode of feeling. Now the works composed by Chopin before he came to Paris and got acquainted with Liszt, comprise not only a sonata, a trio, two concertos, variations, polonaises, waltzes, mazurkas, one or more nocturnes, etc., but also—and this is for the question under consideration of great importance—most of, if not all, the studies of Op. 10 (Sowinski says that Chopin brought with him to Paris the MS. of the first book of his studies) and some of Op. 25; and these works prove decisively the inconclusiveness of the lady's argument. The twelfth study of Opus 10 (composed in September, 1831) invalidates all she says about fire, passion, and rushing torrents. In fact, no cogent reason can be given why the works mentioned by her should not be the outcome of unaided development. [That is to say, development not aided in the way indicated by Miss Ramann.] The first Scherzo alone might make us pause and ask whether the new features that present themselves in it ought not to be fathered on Liszt. But seeing that Chopin evolved so much, why should he not alsohave evolved this? Moreover, we must keep in mind that Liszt had, up to 1831, composed almost nothing of what in after years was considered either by him or others of much moment, and that his pianoforte style had first to pass through the state of fermentation into which Paganini's playing had precipitated it (in the spring of 1831) before it was formed; on the other hand, Chopin arrived in Paris with his portfolios full of masterpieces, and in possession of a style of his own as a player of his instrument as well as a writer for it. That both learned from each other cannot be doubted; but the exact gain of each is less easily determinable. Nevertheless, I think I may venture to assert that whatever may be the extent of Chopin's indebtedness to Liszt, the latter's indebtedness to the former is greater. The tracing of an influence in the works of a man of genius, who, of course, neither slavishly imitates nor flagrantly appropriates, is one of the most difficult tasks. If Miss Ramann had first noted the works produced by the two composers in question before their acquaintance began, and had carefully examined Chopin's early productions with a view to ascertain his capability of growth, she would have come to another conclusion, or, at least have spoken less confidently."

To the above no exception may be taken except the reference to the B-minor Scherzo as possibly having been suggested by Liszt. For me it is most characteristic of Chopin in its perverse,even morbid, ironical humour, its original figuration; who but Chopin could have conceived that lyrical episode! Liszt, doubtless, was the first who introduced interlocking octaves instead of the chromatic scale at the close; Tausig followed his example. But there the matter ended. Once when Chopin heard that Liszt intended to write an account of his concerts for theGazette Musicale, he said: "He will give me a little kingdom in his empire." This remark casts much illumination on the relations of the two men. Liszt was the broader minded of the two; Chopin, as Niecks points out, forgave but never forgot.

The Roman candle has attracted many spiritual moths. Goethe, Humboldt, Platen, Winckelmann, Thorwaldsen, Gregorovius and Liszt—to mention only the first at hand—fluttered to Rome and ascribe to it much of their finer productivity. For Franz Liszt it was a loadstone of double power—the ideality of the place attracted him and its religion anchored his spiritual restlessness.

Liszt liked a broad soul-margin to his life. Heine touched on this side of Liszt's character when he wrote of him: "Speculation has the greatest fascination for him; and still more than with the interests of his art is he engrossed with all manner of rival philosophical investigations which are occupied with the solution of all great questions of heaven and earth. For long he was an ardent upholder of the beautiful Saint-Simonian idea of the world. Later the spiritualistic or rather vaporous thoughts of Ballanche enveloped him in their midst; now he is enthusiasticover the Republican-Catholic dogmas of a Lamennais who has hoisted his Jacobin cap on the cross.... Heaven knows in what mental stall he will find his next hobby-horse!" This was written in 1837, and only two years afterward Liszt paid his first visit to Rome.

Based on letters and diaries of Liszt, Gregorovius, Ad. Stahr, Fanny Lewald, W. Allmers, Cardinal Wiseman, Jul. Schnorr von Carolsfeld, and Eugen Segnitz, a study of Franz Liszt in Rome may be made.

The time spent in the Eternal City was unquestionably an important one in Liszt's life and worthy of the detailed attention given it. Rome in 1839 presented a contradictory picture. Contrasted to the pomp of the Vatican were the unprincipled conditions of the city itself. Bands of robbers infested it and the surroundings, making it as unsafe as an English highway during the glorious but rather frisky times of Jonathan Wild and his agile confrères. So, for instance, Massocia and his band kidnapped the pupils of the seminary in Albano, and when the demanded ransom was not forthcoming defiantly strung up these innocents on trees flanking the gateways of Rome. So, too, the political freedom of the city found a concession in the privilege of Cardinal Consalvi, who permitted foreign papers of every political party to be read openly; while the papal edict declared null and void all contracts closed between Christian and Hebrew.

In matters of art things were not much better. The censor swung his axe in a most irresponsible and, now to us, laughable manner. Overbeck's Holy Family was condemned because the feet of the Madonna in it were too bare; Thorwaldsen's Day and Night was offensive in its nudeness; Raphael's art was an eyesore, and the same discriminating mind, Padre Piazza, would have liked to consign to the flames all philosophical books.

The musical taste and standard was not elevating at this time. Piccini, Paisiello, Cimarosa, Sacchini, Anfossi, Sarti, Righini, Paer, and Rossini wrote purely for the sensual enjoyment of the people.

Even the behaviour of the masses in theatres was defined by an edict issued by Leo XII. Any poor devil caught wearing his hat in the theatre was shown the door; if an actor interpolated either gesture or word not provided for in the prompt-book he was sent to the galleys for five years; the carrying of weapons in places of amusement was punishable with life sentence in the galleys, and wounding another during a row earned a death verdict for the unfortunate one; applause and hisses were rewarded by a prison term from two months to half a year.

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