F. Liszt
Weimar, June l0th, 1872
117. To Wilhelm von Lenz
Very Honored Friend,
I owe you thanks in the 24 major and minor keys for the remembrance you keep of me, and the ardent style in which you publish it to the world. Your pamphlet ["Die grossen Pianoforte- Virtuosen unsrer Zeit" The Great Pianoforte Players of our Day.] draws down upon itself a capital reproach; it is that you make me out too grand and too fine. I am far from deserving it, and I confess it without any false modesty; but since you have been pleased thus to overwhelm me I can but bow in silence,—and press your hand.
No one possesses less than myself the talent of talking with the pen, and the necessity of receiving more than a hundred letters a month (not counting bills, and the numerous sendings of manuscript or printed works which I have to read) makes correspondence again more than difficult for me. It is all I can do to get through the necessary epistolary work imposed upon me…Moreover the greater part of the things which are easily said is indifferent to me, and those that I wish to say resist ordinary language. On this subject some one well said to me:
"Words seem to me to intercept feeling rather than to express it; and actions, alas! seem to me sometimes like a thick veil thrown over our soul: looks even seem to be trammelled by phantom barriers, and souls which seek one another across the sufferings of life only find one another—such is my belief—in prayer and in music."—
What wit, what sallies and what brilliant sparks in your "Quartet of Pianist Virtuosi!"—Don't let us forget the etymology of the word "Virtuoso," how it comes from the "Cicerone" in Rome—and let us reascend to Chopin, the enchanting aristocrat, the most refined in his magic. Pascal's epigraph, "One must not get one's nourishment from it, but use it as one would an essence," is only appropriate to a certain extent. Let us inhale the essence, and leave it to the druggists to make use of it. You also, I think, exaggerate the influence which the Parisian salons exercised on Chopin. His soul was not in the least affected by them, and his work as an artist remains transparent, marvellous, ethereal, and of an incomparable genius—quite outside the errors of a school and the silly trifling of a salon. He is akin to the angel and the fairy; more than this, he sets in motion the heroic string which has nowhere else vibrated with so much grandeur, passion and fresh energy as in his "Polonaises," which you brilliantly designate as "Pindaric Hymns of Victory."
No need to tell you that I fully share in your admiration and sympathy for Tausig and Henselt. Do you know Wagner's epigraph "Fur Carl Tausig's Grab"?
"Reif sein zum Sterben, Des Lebens zogernd spriessende Frucht Fruh reif sic erwerben, In Lenzes jaherbluhender Flucht—War es dein Loos, war es dein Wagen: Wir mussen dein Loos wie dein Wagen beklagen."