"She came at an inopportune moment, for there were only five of us in the room, and we were having a most entertaining time with Liszt, that lovely June afternoon, and he did not feel disposed to be interrupted by a stranger. In spite of himself, he could not help doing justice to her talent, saying: 'She did not play at all badly.' This, however, the poor girl never knew. She probably wept briny tears of disappointment when she returned to her hotel.
"While Liszt resented being called a 'piano-teacher,' he nevertheless was one, in the higher sense of the term. It was the difference between the scientific college professor of genius and the ordinary school-teacher which distinguished him from the rank and file of musical instructors.
"Nobody could be more appreciative of talent than Liszt was—even of talent which was not of the first order—and I was often amazed to see the trouble he would give himself with some industrious young girl who had worked hard over big compositions like Schumann's Carnival, or Chopin's sonatas. At one of the musical gatherings at the Frauleins' Stahr (music-teachers in Weimar, to whose simple home Liszt liked to come) I have heard him accompany on a second piano Chopin's E minor concerto, which was technically well played, by a girl of nineteen from the Stuttgart Conservatory.
"It was a contrast to see this young girl, with her rosy cheeks, big brown eyes, and healthy, everyday sort of talent, at one piano, and Liszt, the colossal artist, at the other.
"He was then sixty-three years old, but the fire of youth burned in him still. Like his successor, Paderewski, Liszt sat erect, and never bent his proud head over the 'stupid keys,' as he called them, even deprecating his pupils' doing so. He was very picturesque, with his lofty and ideal forehead thrown back, and his magnificent iron-gray hair falling in thick masses upon his neck. The most divine expression came over his face when he began to play the opening measures of the accompaniment, and I shall never forget the concentration and intensity he put into them if I live to be a hundred! The nobility and absolute 'selflessness' of Liszt's playing had to be heard to be understood. There was something about his tone that made you weep, it was so apart from earth and so ethereal!"
VON BÜLOW CRITICISES
"I look forward eagerly," Bülow wrote to a friend, "to your Chopin, that immortal romanticist par excellence, whose mazurkas alone are a monument more enduring than metal. Never will this great, deep, sincere, and at the same time tender and passionate poet become antiquated. On the contrary, as musical culture increases, he will appear in a much brighter light than to-day, when only the popular Chopin is in vogue, whereas the more aristocratic, manly Chopin, the poet of the last two scherzi, the last two ballads, the barcarole, the polonaise-fantaisie, the nocturnes, Op. 9, No. 3; Op. 48; Op. 55, No. 2, etc., still awaits the interpreters who have entered into his spirit and among whom, if God grants me life, I should like to have the pride of counting myself.
"You know from my introduction to the études how highly I esteem Chopin. In his pieces we find Lenau, Byron, Musset, Lamartine, and at the same time all sorts of heathen Apollo priests. You shall learn through me to love him dearly.
"We must grant Chopin the great distinction of having in his works fixed the boundaries between piano and orchestral music, which other romanticists, notably Robert Schumann, confused, to the detriment of both.