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Thalberg did not immediately begin to perform in public, but, on returning to Vienna in 1827, played continually at private soirées, where he had the advantage of being heard and criticised by the foremost amateurs and musicians of the Austrian capital. It had some time since become obvious to the initiated that another great player was about to be launched on his career.
"Some people have a scale of your whole nervous system and can play all the gamut of your sensibilities in semi-tones, touching the naked nerve-pulps as a pianist strikes the keys of his instrument. I am satisfied that there are as great masters of this nerve-playing as Vieuxtemps or Thalberg in their lines of performance.
Franz Liszt thrown on his own Resources. The Artistic Circle in Paris. Liszt in the Banks of Romanticism. His Friends and Associates. Mme. D'Agoult and her Connection with Franz Liszt. He retires to Geneva. Is recalled to Paris by the Thalberg Furore. Rivalry between the Artists, and their Factions. He commences his Career as Traveling Virtuoso. The Blaze of Enthusiasm throughout Europe.
In 1845, while still in the service of the Austrian emperor, though he did not intermit his musical tours through the principal European cities, Thalberg married the charming widow, whom he had known and admired before her marriage, the daughter of the great singer Lablache, Mme. Bouchot, whose first husband had been the distinguished French painter of that name.
Mina Thalberg, pulling down the embroidered frocks over the round legs of her English-looking children, seemed to narrow the width of the Atlantic Ocean between Liverpool and the docks on the Hudson River. She returned to the hotel with an appetite for lunch and a new expression in her eyes which made Ughtred stare at her. "Mother," he said, "you look different. You look well.
Once when he was a guest at dinner at a rich man's house in Paris, he was asked by the host to play a patent violation of etiquette toward a distinguished artist. Chopin demurred. The host continued to press him, urging that Liszt and Thalberg had played in his house after dinner. "But," protested Chopin, "I have eaten so little!" and thus put an end to the matter.
It looked then as though he had started on a virtuoso career, as the wonder children Mozart, Chopin, Thalberg, Liszt and others who had preceded him, had done. The future proved, however, that César's life work was to be composing, teaching and organ playing, with a quiet life, even in busy Paris, instead of touring the world to make known his gifts.
Without having heard Thalberg, our artist had already divined the secret of his effects, and borrowed from them enough to give a new impulse to an inventive faculty which was fertile in expedients and quick to assimilate all things of value to the uses of its own insatiable ambition. Franz Liszt's career as a traveling virtuoso commenced in 1837, and lasted for twelve years.
The cities of Germany received him with the most éclatant admiration, and his feats of skill as a performer were trumpeted by the newspapers and musical journals as something unprecedented in the art of pianism. From Germany Thalberg proceeded to France and England, and his audiences were no less pronounced in their recognition.
"But seriously, Thalberg and Vieuxtemps have never done us any harm that we know of, and we don't suppose they intend to. We wouldn't much mind hearing their music, for no doubt it is nearly, if not quite, as good as that of the average common run of Dutchmen, which, as the latter will tell you, is saying a good deal." And yet musical culture was said to be in its infancy in America at that time!
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