Next spring "Sardanapalus" will be ready,—and I shall perhaps have to speak to you about another matter at the same time, a matter about which it is worth while speaking to you.—
Be good enough to acknowledge the receipt of these lines; but pray spare me abuse, and be pleased to do me the honor of believing without reserve or restriction in the upright sincerity of my sympathies, and in my frank and firm good-will to transform them into acts or deeds, according to circumstances, in the degree of which I am capable.
Yours ever, with admiration and friendship,
F. Liszt
392. To Frau Charlotte Moscheles (?)
[Draft of an undirected autograph letter in the Liszt-Museum at Weimar.—Presumably written to the wife of the distinguished piano-virtuoso and teacher Ignaz Moscheles]
I am most grateful to you, Madame, for wishing to keep me in remembrance on the occasion of the publication of the Album of Workers, and I hasten to reply as quickly and as well as I can.
I must, nevertheless, confess to you in all sincerity that I am a little embarrassed as to the choice to be made among the number of useless and unusable manuscripts which I should be charmed to put at your kind disposal. After the Arbeiter Chor [workman's chorus] and the Arbeiter Marsch [workman's march] with which I have just gratified two Albums in Vienna, your gracious letter comes as a surprise rather short of apropos. How malapropos, is it not? But let us see how to remedy this.—
I thought first of a "Marche funebre" for the use of the bankers; then of an "Elegie" dedicated to the idle; next of "Jeremiades Omnibus" [lamentations for all];—but nothing of that sort quite satisfies me.
In default of perfection, permit me to be satisfied with the relative best (which will be, it seems to me, a better choice): a Paraphrase—charitably adapted to the fingers of charitable pianists who will have the charity to buy and to play it—of Rossini's "Charite;" which I shall have the honor of sending to you through Mr. Kistner early in July. An old saying of a very old Father of the Church would, if needful, justify this choice. "In things necessary, Unity; in matters doubtful, Liberty; in all things, Charity!"—