Letters of Franz Liszt -- Volume 2 / from Rome to the End - Franz Liszt

363. To Ferdinand Taborszky, Music Publisher in Budapest

Antwerp, June 8th, 1885

Very dear Friend,

From Weimar, where I shall once more be in ten days' time, you will receive at the beginning of July some short Hungarian pianoforte pieces, which I shall orchestrate later on, entitled:

The last piece has already been published by Taborszky, but must have a few more concluding bars in the new edition.

"Mosonyi's Trauerklange" (Mosonyi's funeral music), which you have already had by you for fifteen years, shall make No. 7. Our friend Mosonyi, so excellent and full of character, and so pre- eminent a musician, must also not be forgotten.

The seven numbers make altogether sixty pages of print. All the new pieces are perfectly ready, written out in manuscript, only requiring a copyist, whom I cannot find while I am on my journey. [Liszt's intention to orchestrate the pieces remained unfulfilled.]

When I send you the manuscripts I will write all further particulars with regard to the publishing of them.

First of all, dear friend, will you be so kind as to go to my house with Frau von Fabry? I stupidly forgot there—in the bedroom, not in the salon—the beautiful and revised copy of a composition for piano and violin or violoncello, together with the transcription of the same for pianoforte alone. The title is "La lugubre Gondola" (the funeral gondola). As though it were a presentiment, I wrote this elegie in Venice six weeks before Wagner's death.