Your
position in Bonn appears to me to offer you decidedly improving
chances from year to year, and in these regions so much is
wanting...that I am constrained to be satisfied with small
things. Well, what must be will be. Meanwhile keep in kind
remembrance
Yours in sincere friendship,
F. Liszt
Weymar, December 14th, 1854
129. To William Mason in New York
[A pupil of Liszt's, born 1828 at Boston, esteemed as a first-
rate piano virtuoso in America]
My dear Mason,
Although I do not know at what stage of your brilliant artistic
peregrinations these lines will find you, yet I want you to know
that I am most sincerely and affectionately obliged to you for
the kind remembrance you keep of me, and of which the papers you
send me give such good testimony. "The Musical Gazette" of New
York, in particular, has given me a real satisfaction, not only
on account of the personally kind and flattering things it
contains about me, but also because that paper seems to ingraft a
superior and excellent direction on to opinion in your country.
Now you know, my dear Mason, that I have no other pride than to
serve, as far as in me lies, the good cause of Art, and whenever
I find intelligent men conscientiously making efforts for the
same end I rejoice and am comforted by the good example they give
me. Will you please give my very sincere compliments and thanks
to your brother, who, I suppose, has taken the editorship-in-
chief of, the Musical Gazette, and if he would like to have some
communications from Weymar on what is going on of interest in the
musical world of Germany I will let him have them with great
pleasure through Mr. Pohl, who, by the way, no longer lives in
Dresden (where the numbers of the Musical Gazette were addressed
to him by mistake), but in the Kaufstrasse, Weymar. His wife,
being one of the best harpists whom I know, is, now among the
virtuosi of our orchestra, which is a sensible improvement both
for opera and concerts. -
A propos of concerts, I will send you in a few days the programme
of a series of Symphonic performances which ought to have been
established here some years ago, and to which I consider myself
in honor as in duty bound to give a definite impetus at the
beginning of the year 1855. - Toward the end of January I expect
Berlioz. We shall then hear his trilogy of "L'Enfance du Christ,"
[The Childhood of Christ] of which you already know "La Fuite en
Egypte," [The Flight into Egypt] to which he has added two other
little Oratorios called "Le Songe d'Herode" [Herod's Dream] and
"L'Arrivee a Sais." [The Arrival at Sais] - His dramatic Symphony
of Faust (in four parts, with solos and chorus) will also be
given entire while he is here.
