I haven't been doing much of anything lately, except going to concerts, of which I have heard an immense number, and all of them admirable.—I wish you could hear Joachim! I went last night to his third soiree, and he certainly is the wonder of the age. Unless I were to rave I never could express him. One of his pieces was a quartette by Haydn, which was perfectly bewitching. The adagio he played so wonderfully, and drew such a pathetic tone from his violin, that it really went through one like a knife. The third movement was a jig, and just the gayest little piece! It flashed like a humming bird, and he played every note so distinctly and so fast that people were beside themselves, and it was almost impossible to keep still. It received a tremendous encore.
Joachim is so bold! You never imagined such strokes as he gives the violin—such tones as he brings out of it. He plays these great tours de force, his fingers rushing all over the violin, just as Tausig dashes down on the piano. So free! And then his conception!! It is like revealing Beethoven in the flesh, to hear him.
I heard a lady pianist the other day, who is becoming very celebrated and who plays superbly. Her name is Fräulein Menter, and she is from Munich. She has been a pupil of Liszt, Tausig and Bülow. Think what a galaxy of teachers! She is as pretty as she can be, and she looked lovely sitting at the piano there and playing piece after piece. I envied her dreadfully. She plays everything by heart, and has a beautiful conception. She gave her concert entirely alone, except that some one sang a few songs, and at the end Tausig played a duet for two pianos with her, in which he took the second piano. Imagine being able to play well enough for such a high artist as he to condescend to do such a thing! It was so pretty when they were encored. He made a sign to go forward. She looked up inquiringly, and then stepped down one step lower than he. He smiled and applauded her as much as anybody. I thought it was very gallant in him to stand there and clap his hands before the whole audience, and not take any of the encore to himself, for his part was as important as hers, and he is a much greater artist. I was charmed with her, though. She goes far beyond Mehlig and Topp, though Mehlig, too, is considered to have a remarkable technique.
I regret so much that M. will have to go back to America without seeing Paris—the most beautiful city in the world! Nobody knows how long the war is going to last. The Prussians have so surrounded Paris that it is cut off from the country, and can't get any supplies. They have eaten up all their meat, and now the French are living upon rats, dogs and cats! Just think how horrid! They catch the rats in the Paris sewers, and cook them in champagne and eat them. (At least that is the story.) It seems perfectly inconceivable. The poor things have no milk, no salt, no butter and no meat. I wonder what they do with all the little babies whose mothers can't nurse them, and with young children. They will not give up, however, for they have bread and wine enough to last all winter, and they declare that Paris is too strong to be taken. Of course if the Prussians remain where they are, eventually Paris will be starved out, and will be obliged to surrender.
It is a difficult position for the Prussians, for they must either bombard the city, or starve it out. If they bombard it, they must be in a situation to begin it from all sides, or else the French will break through their lines, and establish a communication with the rest of France. Now the circle round Paris is twelve miles long, so that it would take an enormous army to keep up such a bombardment, and although the Prussian army is enormous, I don't know whether it is equal to that, for the French have so much the advantage of position that they can fire down on the Prussians, and kill them by thousands. On the other hand, if they starve Paris out, the poor soldiers will have to lie out in the cold all winter, and many of them will die from the exposure.
The men are getting very restless from so many weeks of inactivity. Nobody knows how it is to end. The King is opposed to bombardment, for aside from the terrible loss of life it would cause, it seems too inhuman to lay such a splendid city in the dust. Fresh troops are sent on all the time, and every day the trains pass my windows packed with soldiers. It seems as if every man in Germany were being called out, and that looks like bombardment. It is a terrible time, and everybody feels restless and disturbed. One sees few soldiers on the streets except wounded ones. I often meet a young man who is wheeled about in a chair, who has had both legs cut off. The poor fellow looks so sad—and I know of another who has lost both hands and both feet.
It is curious to note the condescending attitude taken by people here toward the French in this war. They never for a moment speak of them as if they were antagonists on equal ground, but always as if they were a set of fools bent on their own destruction, who must be properly chastised and restored to their equilibrium by the Germans. "Ja!—die Franzosen!" the Germans will say with a shrug which implies the deepest conviction of their entire imbecility. They admit, however, that the French are an "amusing people," and that "Paris ist DOCH die Welt-Stadt. (Paris is the city of the world.)"
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BERLIN, February 26, 1871.
I am going to send you a song out of the Meistersänger, which I think is one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard. It is called Walther's Traumlied (Walter's Dream Song). The idea of it is that he sees his love in a dream or vision as she will be when she is his wife. You must begin to sing in a dreamy way, as if you were in a trance, and then you must gradually become more and more excited until you end in a grand gush of passion. You will be quite in the music of the future if you sing out of the Meistersänger. It is one of Wagner's greatest operas, and is very beautiful, in my opinion. It caused a grand excitement when it came out last winter.