Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 207, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 September 1917 — LISZT SPOILED BY ADULATION [ARTICLE]

LISZT SPOILED BY ADULATION

Great Plano Virtuoso Never Employed ■ to Best Advantage the Great Gift That He Possessed. It Is only when we remember Liszts profession that we 6an read the riddle he presents. From childhood up, he was the idolized piano virtuoso. He was petted and adored all his life. He was smothered all his life under the adulation showered upon him in every capital of Europe, Showered upon him in every tangible form by women of the highest society. His was not a character profound or fine enough to right itself. He never managed to develop out of that' stage, to contact with truly nourishing things. On the •contrary, he became completely uprooted, came to exist entirely in thia modern Capua, came to love It and to crave the rose leaves and the clouds of perfume. His music is largely an inspiration toward it, an attempt to perpetuate about him the admiration and adulation, the glowing eyes and half parted lips, the heaving bosoms, It is a mechanism for procuring for himself the Pascha power he desired. Indeed, beside Liszt, Chopin seems a veritable anchorite. True, Liszt Interested himself In music for another reason. If it served to procure him the particular “place in the sun” that he craved, it furnished him also with a most engaging pastime. He interested himself In music as one might Interest oneself in a sport as one becomes more proficient in It. He studied Its rules, its teachings, Its tricks. With what keenness he mastered them his compositions show. But that interest was only minor. The other was the major.—Paul Rosenfleld, In Seven Arts Magazine.