Cordial thanks for your visit to Brussels, and ever yours in admiration and friendship.
F. Liszt
Weimar, May 14th, 1882
299. To Madame Malwine Tardieu
Dear Kind Friend, ["Chere bienveillante">[
The telegram Tardieu-Lynen-Lessmann sent from Aix-la-Chapelle has given me extreme pleasure. [The Tardieus, the Lynens (Antwerp friends of Liszt), and Otto Lessmann were present at the Musical Festival at Aix-la-Chapelle.]
My padrone di casa (Lessmann is this through his paper) are always most excellent.
Daniela de Bulow, my darling granddaughter, writes how kind you are, and will come with us shortly to Villa "Fantaisie" (Bayreuth). [She had accompanied her father, Dr. Hans V. Bulow, who played (under Wullner's conductorship) Brahms' first Pianforte Concerto, and Beethoven's 15 Variations (on a theme out of Eroica).]
At "Parsifal" we shall be 30,000; that will be the best chance of seeing one another again.
The Opera of Hamlet, by Stadtfeld, [The first performance of the Opera. The composer, a Wiesbaden man (born 1826), had studied at the Brussels Conservatoire, and died there in 1853.] written in transition years (50), and twice given here, not without success, is one of the best that I know of the Meyerbeer-Donizetti genre. The Wagner invasion is strangely modifying theatrical requirements at the present time. It is no longer possible to write a "Hamlet" according to the style of a Duprez, some absolute tenor with the famous "ut de boitrine," nor to make the ghost of Hamlet's father benevolently intervene in order to effect a Trio or Quartet, even of a pretty musical manufacture. The distinguished work of Stadtfeld belongs, then, to the theatrical Past, so rich in oblivion…