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Updated: June 19, 2025
It is interesting to note that Kelley was diverted into music from painting by hearing "Blind Tom" play Liszt's transcription of Mendelssohn's "Midsummer Night's Dream" music. I imagine that this idiot-genius had very little other influence of this sort in his picturesque career.
People were fond of comparing the two young men who so often appeared in the same salons together Liszt with his finely shaped, long, oval head and profil d'ivoire, set proudly on his shoulders, his stiff hair of dark blonde thrown back from the forehead without a parting, and cut in a straight line, his aplomb, his magnificent and courtly bearing, his ready tongue, his flashing wit and fine irony, his genial bonhomie and irresistibly winning smile; and Chopin, also, with dark blonde hair, but soft as silk, parted on one side, to use Liszt's own words, "An angel of fair countenance, with brown eyes from which intellect beamed rather than burned; a gentle, refined smile, slightly aquiline nose; a delicious, clear, almost diaphanous complexion, all bearing witness to the harmony of a soul which required no commentary beyond itself."
Besides these, there was one of Liszt's "Rhapsodies Hongroises," an impromptu by Schubert, and several orchestral pieces; but the greater part of the programme was devoted to Chopin, because Halfdan, with his great, hopeless passion laboring in his breast, felt that he could interpret Chopin better than he could any other composer. He carried his audience by storm.
After this my friend took leave of us, after having arranged for another meeting with me in the autumn. Although I felt quite disconsolate after Liszt's departure, the officials of Zurich took good care that I should soon have some diversion, of a kind to which I had hitherto been a stranger.
Very pleasant were the select gatherings which on several occasions met round Liszt's own dinner-table, and I thought of the absent hostess of Altenburg at one of them. Once we had our meal in the garden, and I had the pleasure of seeing my good friend Alwine Frommann there conversing intelligently with Ollivier, as a reconciliation with Liszt had taken place.
After an intermission, which she spent simply sitting quietly, pondering the exquisite delicacies of Liszt's piano writing, the second part of the concert opened with Vivaldi's "The Four Seasons", performed by an intimate ensemble rather than with the full complement of strings. The performers were students, to be sure, but she found it delightful nonetheless.
Franz gave his first concert in London on June ninth and proved how much he had gained in power and brilliancy. Moscheles, who was present, wrote: "Franz Liszt's playing surpasses in power and the overcoming of difficulties anything that has yet been heard." The strain of constant travel and concert playing was seriously telling on the boy's sensitive, excitable nature.
He found some consolation for his manifold troubles in Liszt's Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, and wrote her many letters which La Mara published under the title of "The Apotheosis of Friendship." Then at Lyons he met again Her of the pink slippers, now Madame Fournier, and a widow. He was fifty-seven and she still six years his elder.
To give the reader an idea of the character of the concert, I shall quote largely from Liszt's notice, in which he not only sets forth the merits of the artists, but also describes the appearance of the room and the audience. First, however, I must tell a pretty anecdote of which this notice reminds me.
What to the sensitive critic is a charming wavering and swaying in the measure "Chopin leans about freely within his bars," wrote an English critic for the classicists was a rank departure from the time beat. According to Liszt's description of the rubato "a wind plays in the leaves, Life unfolds and develops beneath them, but the tree remains the same that is the Chopin rubato."
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