MOSENTHAL
Anton Rubinstein's librettist, in some reminiscences of his collaborateur says:
"It must have been in 1840 that I saw Rubinstein for the first time, when scarcely ten years old; he had travelled in Paris with his teacher, and plucked his first laurels with his childish hands. It was then that Franz Liszt, hearing the boy play, and becoming acquainted with his first compositions, with noble enthusiasm proclaimed him the sole inheritor of his fame. The prediction has been fulfilled; already in the fulness of his activity, Liszt recognised in Rubinstein a rival on equal footing with himself, and since he has ceased to appear before the public he has greeted Rubinstein as the sole ruler in the realm of pianists. When Rubinstein was director of the Musical Society in Vienna, 1876, and the élite of the friends of art gathered every week in his hospitable house, I once had the rare pleasure of hearing him and Liszt play, not only successively during the same evening, but also together on the piano. The question, which of the two surpassed the other, recalled the old problem whether Goethe or Schiller is the greatest German poet. But when they both sat down to play a new concerto by Rubinstein, which Liszt, with incredible intuition, read at sight, it was really as good as a play to watch the gray-haired master, as, smiling good-naturedly, he followed his young artist, and allowed himself, as if on purpose, to be surpassed in fervor and enthusiastic powers."