Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

LISZT 109
knew it not, one of those who paid him homage with
every single nerve and fibre of my nature. I think it
is Lenz who, in the little book called Beethoven et ses
trois styles, has called Liszt ' the apotheosis of the
pianoforte '; and let me say that no words from any
pen, were they ever so forcible, ever so suggestive,
could give the most imaginative reader any adequate
idea of what Liszt was all round. One felt as if one
were standing at the foot of a great mountain, whose
summit was veiled in luminous clouds. Whichever
way you viewed him, there was immense variety.
He was grand and colossal. He was a large nature,
and yet full of grace and sweetness. His rendering
of the middle part in Chopin's B Minor Scherzo
(which Silotti brought him) will linger in my memory
as ' a joy for ever.' On another occasion he played,
' with pauses ' (in showing a young American lady
his reading of the piece), the greater part of Chopin's
Fourth Ballade, and on that afternoon, being in an
especially genial mood, he spoke of the composition,
and bade her observe how the composer, having
wandered away from the opening thought, seemed
afterwards to be as it were groping for it ; and this
groping, this seeking, Liszt pictured to us most
wonderfully in his playing — when, without losing
that which is the very life of a composition, its
rhythmic beat, he seemed to waver and sway, as if
uncertain whether to go on in that rhythm or not.
During this wavering and swaying, he turned at