“Music laid dead on the battlefield and the bells of Strasbourg tolled at its funeral.”
He put down the newspaper and looked inside for a moment – he felt nothing. It is some thirty-five years since he left his own idol at the edge of the ditch and walked instead of traveling a gilded carriage. A hitherto non-existent road, of which critics, professionals and members of music commissions had been screaming in his ears for thirty-five years that it led nowhere. And about him – at first in whispers and winks, later more and more boldly, with the menacing tone of street thief gangs – it was spread with a barely concealed joy that he had gone mad, our of his mind, for he was the first among pianists and the last among composers.
There was no change in his face, perhaps his tired wrinkles became a shade greyer, and his back a bit more hunched, for every minute he carried the carcass of his dead children – the works he was born to create, which gave form to what he could no longer relate with his fingers, and which were lustfully murdered by well-chosen, poisonous words, and which were senselessly suffocated by the vacuum of neglect.
There was no change in his face: he remembered Richard’s mocking half-sentence about the oratorio, Cosima’s pitying, alien glance, and then Carolyne, who could not be completely his. He could not recall the beginning of this battle started in which he seemed destined to lose. . “I’ve still stood up so far,” he thought crookedly, and then, bending his stiff legs with difficulty, he knelt down by his worn kneele, so that the turmoil of his soul might be resolved into peace by the harmony of heaven, and so that he might find again the fire that would heat the furnace of the new piece of his.
Abbey Liszt bowed his head, and was not surprised to see a somber drop of blood on his large, clasped hands.
(Franz Liszt: 22 October 1811 – 31 July 1886)
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Author: Máté Hámori
