Franz Liszt

Were I to tell you what my feelings were on carefully perusing and reperusing this essay, I could hardly find terms to express myself. Let this suffice: I feel more than fully rewarded for my trials, my sacrifices and artistic struggles, on noting the impression I have made on you in particular. To be thus completely understood was my only ambition; and to have been understood is the most ravishing gratification of my longing.

--Liszt in a Letter to Wagner

In writing of Liszt there is a strong temptation to work the superlative to its limit. In this instance it is well to overcome temptation by succumbing to it.

That word "genius" is much bandied, and often used without warrant; but for those rare beings who leap from the brain of Jove, full-armed, it is the only appellation. No finespun theory of pedagogics or heredity can account for the marvelous talent of Franz Liszt--he was one sent from God.

Yet we find a few fortuitous circumstances that favored his evolution. Possibly, on the other hand, there are those who might say the boy attracted to himself the human elements that he required, and thus worked out his freedom, acquiring that wondrous ability to express his inmost emotions. Art is the beautiful way of doing things. All art is the expression of sublime emotions; and there seems a strong necessity in every soul to impart the joy and the aspiration that it feels. And further, art is for the artist first, just as work is for the worker--it is all just a matter of self-development. And how blessed is it to think that every soul that works out its own freedom gives freedom to others! Liszt is the inspirer of musicians, just as Shakespeare is the inspirer of writers. Strong men make it possible for others to be strong. No man of the century gave the science of music such an impulse for good as this man. To go no further in way of proof, let the truth be stated yet once again, that it was Franz Liszt who threw a rope to the drowning Wagner.

On October Twenty-second, in the year Eighteen Hundred Eleven, when a man-child was born at the village of Raiding, Hungary, the heavens gave no sign, and no signal-flags nor couriers proclaimed the event, all as had been done a week before when a babe was born to the Prince and Princess Esterhazy at the same place. Now the child born last was the son of obscure parents, the father being an underling secretary of the Prince, known as Liszt. The child was very weak and frail, and for some months it was thought hardly possible it could live; but Destiny decreed that the boy should not perish.

The first recollections of Liszt take in, in a happy view, four men playing cards at a square table. One of these men was the boy's father, another was Mein Herr Joseph Haydn, and the other two players are lost in the fog of obscurity. Did they ever know what a wonderful game they played, as little Franz Liszt, sitting on a corner of the table,