“Another day I heard him pass from one piece into another by making the finale of the first one play the part of prelude to the second. So exquisitely were the two woven together that you could hardly tell where the one left off and the other began. Ah, me! such a facile grace! Nobody will ever equal him with those rolling basses and those flowing trebles. And then his Adagios! When you hear him in one of those you feel that his playing has got to that point where it is purified from all earthly dross and is an exhalation of the soul that mounts straight to heaven.”
This little book contains many more beautiful passages but we are reluctantly forced to desist. One charming trait of Liszt is related, however, which we can not pass over in closing. Miss Fay says:
“Gottschal, organist in Weimar, told me that one time when Tausig was ‘hard up’ for money, he sold the score of Liszt’s ‘Faust’ for five thalers, to a servant, along with a great pile of his own notes. Gottschal, hearing of it, went to the man and purchased them. Then he went to Liszt and told him that he had the score. As it happened, the publisher had written for it that very day and Liszt was turning the house upside down, looking for it everywhere. He was in an awful state of mind because his score was nowhere to be found. ‘A whole year’s labor lost,’ he cried, and he was in such a rage that when Gottschal asked him for the third time what he was looking for, he turned and stamped his foot at him and said: ‘You confounded fellow, can’t you leave me in peace and not torment me with your stupid questions?’ Gottschal knew perfectly well what was wanting but he wished to have a little fun out of the matter. At last he took pity on Liszt and said: ‘Herr Doctor, I know what you have lost! It is the score to your Faust.’ ‘O,’ said Liszt, changing his tone immediately, ‘do you know anything of it?’ ‘Of course, I do,’ said Gottschal, and proceeded to unfold Master Tausig’s performance and how he had rescued the precious music. Liszt was transported with joy that it was found and cried out: ‘We are saved, Gottschal has rescued us,’ and then Gottschal said that Liszt embraced him in his transport, and could not say or do enough to make up for his having been so rude to him. Well, you would have supposed that it was now all up with Master Tausig, but not at all. A few days after was Tausig’s birth-day. Madame C. took Gottschal aside and begged him to drop the subject of the note-stealing, for Liszt doted so on his Carl that he wished to forget it. Sure enough, Liszt kissed Carl and congratulated him on his birth-day and consoled himself with his same old observation: ‘You’ll either turn out a great blockhead, my little Carl, or a great master.’”
“O, thou amiable grand master Liszt!”
Thus closes our notice of this genial book. Since the “soulful fantasies” of Bettina about Beethoven, nothing comparable with it from a lady’s hand has appeared.
In closing, we append, with the master’s own approval, as the fac-simile in our own little work shows, a list of his principal scholars. We preface it with a sentiment of the master, which shows how much that remark of Beethoven’s to Bettina about music was to him—“The elevated types of the moral sense also constitute its foundations,” or truth and the will combined. It reads:
“It belongs to the higher mission of art, not only to exhibit and celebrate in song the heroic spirit but to inspire it. Hence the artist should feel it, preserve it and diffuse it like a sacred flame.”
APPENDIX.
A LETTER FROM LISZT’S FATHER.
The Harmonicon, an English musical journal, of June, 1824, contains the following interesting letter, addressed to its editor by Liszt’s father: