A thousand affectionate compliments.
F. Liszt
Budapest, March 11th, 1878
Please send me in any case half a dozen copies of the "Ballade," already printed, to Weimar, where I remain from mid-April till the end of July.
222. To Walter Bache
Very honored and dear Friend,
I have always to be thanking you; it is from my heart, and will ever be so.
The programme of your fourteenth "Annual Concert" is again an act of courage; particularly in London, where my compositions meet with all manner of obstructions—almost more than elsewhere, from the Leipzig Gewandhaus down to many greater and smaller Gewandhausler.
It stands clearly written, a hundred times over, that I cannot compose; without indulging in unseemly protests against this, I quietly go on writing, and set all the greater store by the constancy of some of my friends, particularly Walter Bache, for the stout-* heartedness which till fourteen times fourteen he has for so many years displayed.
In the introduction to your fourteenth Programme F. Niecks
[Friedrich Niecks, Professor of Music at the University of
Edinburgh; the writer of the excellent work "F. Chopin as Man and
Musician">[, a propos of F. Liszt, said very truly:—