39. To Prince Constantine of Hohenzollern-Hechingen
Monseigneur,
Your Highness will understand that it is a necessity of my heart to speak to you of a very happy juncture that assures me henceforth, in full degree, the stability of feeling and of conduct to which I aspired. It seems to me that I should be guilty of ingratitude and wanting in respect to the condescending friendship with which you are good enough to honor me, did I not let you know of the determination I have taken. On Tuesday the 25th April, the festival of St. Mark the Evangelist, I entered into the ecclesiastical state on receiving minor orders in the chapel of H.S.H. Monseigneur Hohenlohe at the Vatican. Convinced as I was that this act would strengthen me in the right road, I accomplished it without effort, in all simplicity and uprightness of intention. Moreover it agrees with the antecedents of my youth, as well as with the development that my work of musical composition has taken during these last four years,—a work which I propose to pursue with fresh vigor, as I consider it the least defective form of my nature.—
To speak familiarly; if "the cloak does not make the monk" it also does not prevent him from being one; and, in certain cases, when the monk is already formed within, why not appropriate the outer garment of one?—
But I am forgetting that I do not in the least intend to become a monk, in the severe sense of the word. For this I have no vocation, and it is enough for me to belong to the hierarchy of the Church to such a degree as the minor orders allow me to do. It is therefore not the frock, but the cassock that I have donned. And on this subject Your Highness will pardon me the small vanity of mentioning to you that they pay me the compliment of saying that I wear my cassock as though I had worn it all my life.
I am now living at the Vatican with Monseigneur Hohenlohe, whose apartment is on the same floor as the Stanze of Raphael. My lodging is not at all like a prison cell, and the kind hospitality that Monseigneur H. shows me exempts me from all painful constraints. So I shall leave it but rarely and for a short time only, as removals and especially journeys have become very burdensome to me for many reasons…It is better to work in peace at home than to go abroad into the world,—except in important cases. One of these is awaiting me in the month of August, and I shall fulfil my promise of going to Pest at the time of the celebration of the musical fetes that are being got up for the 25th anniversary of the establishment of the Conservatoire. My Oratorio of "Saint Elizabeth" and the Symphony of the "Divina Commedia" form part of the programme.
Next year, if Your Highness still thinks of realising your noble project of a musical congress at Lowenberg, I should be very happy to take part in it, and place myself entirely at your orders and service.
Permit me, Monseigneur, to express anew to you my most grateful thanks for the evidences of sympathy you have so generously accorded to myself and to my works; and graciously accept the homage of unchanging sentiments of most respectful devotion with which I have the honor to be
Your Highness's most humble and affectionate servant,
F. Liszt