The last letter that Liszt indited with his own pen is addressed to Frau Sofie Menter, and is dated Bayreuth, July 3, 1886. What proved to be almost a death-bed epistle runs as follows:
"To-morrow, after the religious marriage of my granddaughter Daniela von Bülow to Professor Henry Thode (art-historian), I betake myself to my excellent friends the Munkacsys, Château Colpach, Grand Duchy of Luxemburg. On the 20th July I shall be back here again for the first 7-8 performances of the Festspiel; then alas! I must put myself under the, to me, very disagreeable cure at Kissingen, and in September an operation for the eyes is impending for me with Gräfe at Halle. For a month past I have been quite unable to read, and almost unable to write, with much labour, a couple of lines. Two secretaries kindly help me by reading to me and writing letters at my dictation. How delightful it would be to me, dear friend, to visit you at your fairy castle at Itter! But I do not see any opportunity of doing so at present. Perhaps you will come to Bayreuth, where, from July 20th to the 7th August, will be staying your sincere friend F. Liszt."
The master was spared the infliction of the cure he dreaded at Kissingen, and Frau Menter did not meet him at Bayreuth, for on July 31st Liszt died, what to him must have been a pleasant death, after witnessing the greatest work of the poet-composer whom he had done so much to befriend—Richard Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.
ERNEST LEGOUVÉ
"I am about to make a very bold profession of faith—I adore the piano! All the jests at its expense, all the anathemas that are heaped upon it, are as revolting to me as so many acts of ingratitude, I might say as so many absurdities.
"To me the piano is one of the domestic lares, one of our household gods. It is, thanks to it, and it alone, that we have for ourselves and in our homes the most poetic and the most personal of all the arts—music. What is it that brings into our dwellings an echo of the Conservatory concerts? What is it that gives us the opera at our own firesides? What is it that unites four, five or six harmonious voices in the interpretation of a masterpiece of vocal music, as the trio of Don Juan, the quartet of Moses, or the finale of the Barber of Seville? The piano, and the piano alone. Were the piano to be abolished how could you have the exquisite joy of hearing Faure in your own chamber? I say Faure, but I might say Taffanel, Gillet, all the instrumentalists, for all instruments are its tributaries. They all have need of it; it alone needs none.
"Auber said to me one day: 'What I admire, perhaps, most in Beethoven are some of his sonatas, because in them his thought shows clearly in all its pure beauty, unencumbered by the ornaments of orchestral riches.' But for what instrument were the sonatas of Beethoven composed? For the piano. I cannot forget that the entire work of Chopin was written for the piano. Besides, it is the confidant of the man of genius, of all that he does not write. Ah! if the piano of Weber might repeat what the author of Der Freischütz has spoken to it alone! And, greatest superiority of all, the piano is of all the instruments the only one that is progressive.
"A Stradivarius and an Amati remain superior to all the violins of to-day, and it is not certain that the horn, the flute and the hautbois have not lost as much as they have gained with all the present superabundance of keys and pistons. The piano only has always gained in its transformations, and every one of its enlargements, adding something to its power of expression, has enabled it to improve even the interpretation of the old masters.
"One day when Thalberg was playing at my home a sonata of Mozart on a Pleyel piano, Berlioz said to me: 'Ah! if Mozart were with us, he would hear his admirable andante as he sung it to himself in his breast!'