Liszt early wooed, and early won Vienna. He spoke ever of his dear Viennese, and their resounding city. A concert tour on his way to Paris brought him before the critical public of Stuttgart and Munich. Hummel, an old man, and Moscheles, then in his prime, heard him and declared that his playing was equal to theirs. But Liszt was bent upon completing his studies in the celebrated school of the French capital, and at the feet of the old musical dictator, Cherubini. The Erards, who were destined to owe so much to Liszt, and to whom Liszt throughout his career owed so much, at once provided him with a magnificent piano; but Cherubini put in force a certain by-law of the Conservatoire excluding foreigners, and excluded Franz Liszt.
This was a bitter pill to the eager student. He hardly knew how little he required such patronage. In a very short time "le petit Liszt" was the great Paris sensation. The old noblesse tried to spoil him with flattery, the Duchesse de Berri drugged him with bonbons, the Duke of Orleans called him the "little Mozart." He gave private concerts, at which Herz, Moscheles, Lafont, and De Beriot, assisted. Rossini would sit by his side at the piano, and applaud. He was a "miracle." The company never tired of extolling his "nerve, fougue et originalité," while the ladies who petted and caressed him after each performance, were delighted at his simple and graceful carriage, the elegance of his language, and the perfect breeding and propriety of his demeanor.
He was only twelve when he played for the first time at the Italian Opera, and one of those singular incidents which remind one of Paganini's triumphs occurred. At the close of a bravura cadenza, the band forgot to come in, so absorbed were the musicians in watching the young prodigy. Their failure was worth a dozen successes to Liszt. The ball of the marvellous was fairly set rolling. Gall, the inventor of phrenology, took a cast of the little Liszt's skull; Talma, the tragedian, embraced him openly with effusion; and the misanthropic Marquis de Noailles became his mentor, and initiated him into the art of painting.
In 1824 Liszt, then thirteen years old, came with his father to England; his mother returned to Austria. He went down to Windsor to see George IV., who was delighted with him, and Liszt, speaking of him to me, said: "I was very young at the time, but I remember the king very well—a fine, pompous-looking gentleman." George IV. went to Drury Lane on purpose to hear the boy, and commanded an encore. Liszt was also heard in the theatre at Manchester, and in several private houses.
On his return to France, people noticed a change in him. He was now fourteen, grave, serious, often pre-occupied, already a little tired of praise, and excessively tired of being called "le petit Liszt." His vision began to take a wider sweep. The relation between art and religion exercised him. His mind was naturally devout. Thomas à Kempis was his constant companion. "Rejoice in nothing but a good deed;" "Through labor to rest, through combat to victory;" "The glory which men give and take is transitory," these and like phrases were already deeply engraven on the fleshly tablets of his heart. Amid all his glowing triumphs he was developing a curious disinclination to appear in public; he seemed to yearn for solitude and meditation.
In 1827 he again hurried to England for a short time, but his father's sudden illness drove them to Boulogne, where, in his forty-seventh year, died Adam Liszt, leaving the young Franz for the first time in his life, at the early age of sixteen, unprotected and alone. Rousing himself from the bodily prostration and torpor of grief into which he had been thrown by the death of his father, Franz, with admirable energy and that high sense of honor which always distinguished him, began to set his house in order. He called in all his debts, sold his magnificent grand "Erard," and left Boulogne for Paris with a heavy heart and a light pocket, but not owing a sou.
He sent for his mother, and for the next twelve years, 1828-1840, the two lived together, chiefly in Paris. There, as a child, he had been a nine days' wonder, but the solidity of his reputation was now destined to go hand in hand with his stormy and interrupted mental and moral development. Such a plant could not come to maturity all at once. No drawing-room or concert-room success satisfied a heart for which the world of human emotion seemed too small, and an intellect piercing with intuitive intelligence into the "clear-obscure" depths of religion and philosophy.
But Franz was young, and Franz was poor, and his mother had to be supported. She was his first care. Systematically, he labored to put by a sum which would assure her of a competency, and often with his tender genial smile he would remind her of his own childish words, "God will help me to repay you for all that you have done for me." Still he labored, often woefully against the grain. "Poverty," he writes, "that old mediator between man and evil, tore me from my solitude devoted to meditation, and placed me before a public on whom not only my own but my own mother's existence depended. Young and over-strained, I suffered painfully under the contact with external things which my vocation as a musician brought with it, and which wounded me all the more intensely that my heart at this time was filled entirely with the mystical feelings of love and religion."
