![]() His business affairs, however, kept him away from home, and from thought upon the subject. He allowed his wife to die in confidence that the affair met his approval, but without the faintest intention of permitting so insane a thing as a marriage of his daughter with an untitled musician. But the romance seemed to win her approval, and when suddenly she saw that she was soon to die, she made a last request of her husband, that he should not refuse the young lovers their happiness. The mother was fond of presiding at the music lessons, and of leading the young teacher to air his views about religion and life, and she watched with pleasure the gradual development of what was inevitable, a more than musical sympathy between the daughter and the teacher. The young comtesse was, they say, of slender frame and angelic beauty, and deeply imbued with that religious ardour which, as in Liszt's case, often modulates as imperceptibly into love, as an organist can gradually turn a hymn into a jig, or an Italian aria into a hymn. The young comtesse' mother gave her into Liszt's charge for musical education. The Comte de Saint Criq, then Minister of the Interior, had an only daughter, the seventeen-year-old Caroline. But it was later, when he was giving lessons to support his mother, and just turned seventeen, that he drifted into what was really his first love. It was a set of "exercises," and the compliment was paid to Lydia Garella, a quaint little hunchback, whom he used afterward to refer to as his first love. Never in his life did he cease to thrill with an almost hysterical passion for churchly affairs and ceremonies.Īt fourteen he had dedicated his first composition to the other sex. It makes small difference what you expect, for the reality was that his heart was eager for the seclusion of a monastery his soul pined for religious excitement only! At fourteen he had begun to rebel against his nickname, "Le petit Litz." It was with the utmost difficulty that his father had been able to keep him from making religion his career, and giving up his already glittering fame. Moscheles had already said of him in print: "Franz Liszt's playing surpasses everything yet heard, in power and the vanquishing of difficulties." Here he was, then, young, beautiful, famous, a dazzling musician, and Hungarian. Grind of acquiring technic was all passed. ![]() Sixteen-year-older that he was, he was a man of great fame, and the Of winsomeness that never lost its spell over womankind. Here he was at sixteen, tall and handsome, and with a face Then, as later, he found plenty of pupils, the difference being that then, as not later, he took pay for his lessons, though not even then from all. That stalwart self-reliance and sense of honour, which gave nobility to so much of Liszt's character, now showed itself he sold his grand piano to pay the debts his father had left him, and sent for his mother to come to Paris, where he supported her by giving piano lessons. But in 1827 he died, leaving his sixteen-year-old son alone in Paris. With his father the lad remained, and found him a severe and domineering master. The father and mother had gone to Paris with him but soon the mother went back to Austria-she was a German, the father alone being Hungarian. Even then he used to throw money among the gamins, as later he scattered it in how many directions, with what liberality, and with what princeliness, and from what a slender purse! Kisses of rapturous women, even as was the young Mozart's, theĭifference being that it became a habit in Liszt's case. Liszt's childhood was therefore largely fed upon the embraces and Name, then as to-day, when two of their favourite painters are Here he became a proverb of popularity as "Le petit Litz"-the French inevitably gave some twist to a foreign Then on to Paris and duchesses and princesses galore. When he was eleven years old, after one of his concerts, Beethoven kissed him. Then the poverty of his parents and the ambition of his father found assistance in a stipend from Hungarian noblemen, and he was sent to Vienna to study. He had reached the mature age of six before he began to study the piano compared with Mozart, he was an old man before he gave his first concert-namely, nine years. ![]() Why, his letters to the last of his loves alone make up four volumes! And yet, for a life so proverbially given over to flirtations as his, the beginnings were strangely unprophetic. Liszt's life was so lengthy and so industriously amorous, that it is possible only to float along over the peaks, to touch only the high points. "Liszt, or the Art of Running after Women."-NIETSCHE.
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