A talented pupil of Henselt’s arrived and played for Liszt with great success. Miss Fay says: “She played with the greatest aplomb, although her touch had a certain roughness about it to my ear. But all playing sounds barren by the side of Liszt, for his is the living, breathing impersonation of poetry, passion, grace, wit, coquetry, daring, tenderness and every other fascinating attribute that you can think of.
“I’m ready to hang myself half the time when I’ve been to him. Oh! he is the most phenomenal being in every respect! All that you’ve heard of him would never give you an idea of him. In short, he represents the whole scale of human emotions. He is a many-sided person and reflects back the light in all colors, no matter how you look at him. His pupils adore him, as in fact every one else does, but it is impossible to do otherwise with a person whose genius flashes out of him all the time so, and whose character is so winning.
“One day this week, when we were with Liszt, he was in such high spirits that it was as if he had suddenly become twenty years younger. A student from the Stuttgart Conservatory, played a Liszt concerto. His name is V. Liszt kept up a little running fire of satire all the time he was playing, but in a good-natured way. Everything that he says is so striking. In one place where V. was playing the melody rather feebly Liszt suddenly took his place at the piano, and said: ‘When I play, I always play for the people in the gallery so that those persons who pay only five groschen for their seats may also hear something.’ Then he began and I wish you could have heard him. The sound didn’t seem very loud, but it was penetrating and far-reaching. When he had finished he raised one hand in the air, and you seemed to see all the people in the gallery drinking in the sound. That is the way Liszt teaches you. He presents an idea to you and it takes fast hold of your mind, and it sticks there. Music is such a real, visible thing to him that he always has a symbol, instantly, in the material world to express his idea.
“How he can bear to hear us play, I can not imagine. I assure you, no matter how beautifully we play any piece, the minute Liszt plays it, you would scarcely recognize it. His touch and his peculiar use of the pedals are the secrets of his playing, and then he seems to dive down into the most hidden thoughts of the composer, and fetch them to the surface, so they gleam out at you, one by one, like stars.
“The more I see and hear Liszt the more I am lost in amazement. I can neither eat nor sleep on those days that I go to him. I often think of what Tausig said once: ‘Oh! compared with Liszt, we other artists are all blockheads!’ I did not believe it at the time, but I’ve seen the truth of it.
“Liszt does such bewitching little things. The other day, for instance, Fraulein Gaul was playing something to him, and in it were two runs, and after each run two staccato chords. She did them most beautifully and struck the chords immediately after.
“‘No, no,’ said Liszt, ‘after you make a run you must wait a minute before you strike the chords as if in admiration of your own performance. You must pause, as if to say, ‘now nicely I did that.’ Then he sat down and made a run himself, waited a second, and then struck the two chords in the treble, saying as he did so, ‘Bra-vo,’ and then he played again, struck the other chord, and said again, ‘Bra-vo,’ and positively, it was as if the piano had softly applauded! That is the way he plays everything. It seems as if the piano were speaking with a human tongue.
“You can not conceive anything like Liszt’s playing of Beethoven. When he plays a sonata it is as if the composition rose from the dead and stood transfigured before you. You ask yourself, ‘did I ever play that?’”
Once Miss Fay asked the master to tell her how he produced a certain effect in one of his great passages. He smiled and then immediately played the whole passage. “‘Oh! I’ve invented a great many things,’ he said, indifferently, ‘this for instance,’ and he began playing a double roll of octaves in chromatics in the bass of the piano. It was very grand and made the room reverberate. ‘Magnificent,’ said I. ‘Did you ever hear me do a storm?’ said he. ‘No.’ ‘Ah! you ought to hear me do a storm, storms are my forte.’ Then to himself between his teeth, while a weird look came into his eyes as if he could indeed rule the blast—‘Then crash the trees.’ How ardently I wished he would play a storm, but he did not. Alas, that we poor mortals here below should share so often the fate of Moses and have only a glimpse of the Promised Land, and that without the consolation of being Moses!
“Liszt sometimes strikes wrong notes when he plays, but it does not trouble him in the least, on the contrary he rather enjoys it when he comes down squarely wrong, as it affords him an opportunity of displaying his genius and giving things such a turn that the false note will appear simply a key leading to new and unexpected beauties. An accident of this kind happened to him in one of the Sunday matinees when the room was full of distinguished people and of his pupils. He was rolling up the piano in arpeggios in a very grand manner indeed, when he struck a semi-tone short of the high note upon which he had intended to end. I caught my breath and wondered whether he was going to leave us like that, in mid air, as it were, and the harmony unresolved or whether he would be reduced to the humiliation of correcting himself like ordinary mortals and taking the right chord. A half smile came over his face, as much as to say, ‘don’t fancy that this little thing disturbs me,’ and he instantly went meandering down the piano in harmony with the false note he had struck, and then rolled deliberately up in a second grand sweep, this time striking true. I never saw a more delicious piece of cleverness. It was so quick-witted and so exactly characteristic of Liszt. Instead of giving you a chance to say ‘He has made a mistake,’ he forces you to say, ‘He has shown how to get out of a mistake.’