Schumann used for one. This highly concentrated quality of his music makes it more difficult to understand, and explains why his contemporaries did not appreciate him as they did Mendelssohn. It also helps to explain the better “keeping qualities” of Schumann’s music.

ROBERT AND CLARA SCHUMANN

While Mendelssohn’s songs, for instance, have, as just stated, virtually disappeared from recital programs, Schumann’s are more popular than ever, and seldom today is a program printed without one or a group of them. The best, by far, of his songs are among the hundred he wrote during the year when he married Clara Wieck, after a long contest with her father for the possession of her heart, though it had belonged to him for years. The popularity of Schumann’s songs is due largely to their being the expression of this ardent love. Women have not yet written immortal songs; but they have inspired many of them.

LISZT, THE MANY-SIDED

Richard Wagner called Liszt “the greatest musician of all the ages.” He certainly was the greatest pianist of them all, unequaled to this day; but he was very much more than that. In all departments of music, except the opera and chamber music, he created a new epoch or opened new and glorious vistas; and his influence on the musicians of his time and those who came after him was as great as Wagner’s.

LISZT PLAYING AT THE HOME OF MADAME MUNKACSY

This picture, by the artist Frédéric Régamey, represents one of the brilliant assemblages in the salon of Madame Munkacsy, in Paris. In the picture are many portraits. Beside Liszt stands Madame Munkacsy, next to her Gounod, and grouped in the front are Saint-Saëns, Portales, Daudet and other notables. Munkacsy, the celebrated painter, stands at the back on the extreme left.

The strangest thing in Liszt’s extraordinary career is that when he was at the height of his fame as a pianist, and fabulous sums were offered him for recitals, he renounced his instrument, so far as concerts were concerned. For charity he would play occasionally, and for his friends and his pupils; but not for the paying public. This happened thirty-nine years before he died.

LISZT’S HOME IN WEIMAR

It was in this house that he spent his latter years.

Various motives prompted this action, one of them being that he preferred creative work. Thus it came about that the loss of his contemporaries in not hearing him play was our gain in enabling us to hear his songs, his piano pieces, his choral and orchestral compositions. Many of these are still “music of the future”; but their day is dawning.

At piano recitals, in America as in Europe, no composer’s pieces are now more favored than Liszt’s. Pianists usually place them at the end of the program; not only because they make a brilliant close, but because they prevent the audience from leaving before the end, as few or none want to miss these pieces.

THE DYNAMIC EFFECTS OF LISZT

FRANZ LISZT

From a portrait of him in his youth painted by Ary Scheffer.