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Updated: June 19, 2025
Chopin when angry was alarming, and as, with me, he always restrained himself, he seemed almost to choke and die. The following extracts from Liszt's book partly corroborate, partly supplement, the foregoing evidence: His imagination was ardent, his feelings rose to violence, his physical organisation was feeble and sickly! Who can sound the sufferings proceeding from this contrast?
While I was thus occupied in arranging the little country house for which I had longed so much, and working on the orchestration of the first act of Siegfried, I plunged anew into the philosophy of Schopenhauer and into Scott's novels, to which I was drawn with a particular affection. I also busied myself with elucidating my impressions of Liszt's compositions.
There is, no doubt, some exaggeration in Liszt's statement that whoever came to Chopin from Poland, whether with or without letters of introduction, was sure of a hearty welcome, of being received with open arms.
Both bespeak firmness, hardihood, and command, just as Lord Brougham's hand, which will be found represented on the next page, suggest the jurist, orator, and debater. But it can scarcely be said that the great musician is apparent in Liszt's hand, which is also depicted on the following page.
Those violets were the perfumery of George Sand. She snared him first with violet-water, and thereafter surrounded him with her multitudinous wreaths of tobacco though he neither made nor liked smoke. She, however, puffed voluminously at cigarettes, and even, according to Von Lenz, at long black cigars as did Liszt's princess.
When a cross servant girl, with a bandaged eye, opened the door to him, those sounds seemed to escape from the room and to strike his car. It was a rhapsody of Liszt's, that everybody was tired of, splendidly played but only to one point. When that point was reached the same thing was repeated. Nekhludoff asked the bandaged maid whether the inspector was in. She answered that he was not in.
"Of Liszt's?" "Yes; the one that leaves you wondering." At first she had resented bitterly her not being able to play more satisfyingly. If only music were her work! It seemed an almost malicious touch that fate, in taking away Karl's own work, had also shut him out from hers. Resentment at that had made it hard for her to play for him at all, at first.
A warm glow enveloped the brick façades and the window panes of aged, faintly iridescent glass; there was a remote sound of automobile horns, the illusive murmur of a city never, at its loudest, loud; and, through the walls, the notes of a piano, charming and melancholy. After a little he could distinguish the air it was Liszt's Spanish Rhapsody.
When I afterwards made Liszt's appointment one of my conditions, objection was raised on the part of the general manager at Berlin on the score that the nomination of a Weimar conductor would be regarded as a gross insult to the Prussian court conductors, and I must consequently desist from demanding it.
He was now there, but as a political fugitive, wherefore it was not deemed advisable to have him attend the public performance; but he did secretly witness a rehearsal, and was delighted to find that Liszt's genius had enabled him to penetrate into the innermost recesses of this music. It was impossible, however, for him to stay any longer.
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