Your Castle In The Air For May We Will Build Up On A Solid Basis
In Weymar; For I Am Quite Calculating On Seeing You Then,
Together With Our Charming, Good, Worthy Friend Conradi.
Will you
please, dear Kroll, tell Mr. Germershausen and his family how
gratified I am with their kind remembrance?
When I go to Sagan I
shall certainly give myself the pleasure of calling on him.
Believe me ever your very sincere and affectionate friend,
F. Liszt
42. To Abbe de Lamennais
[Autograph in the possession of M. Alfred Bovet at Valentigney.]
Permit me, illustrious and venerable friend, to recall myself to
your remembrance through M. Ciabatta, who has already had the
honor of being introduced to you last year at my house. He has
just been making a tour in Spain and Portugal with me, and can
give you all particulars about it. I should have been glad also
to get him to take back to you the score, now completed, of the
chorus which you were so good as to entrust to me ("The iron is
hard, let us strike!"), but unfortunately it is not with music as
with painting and poetry: body and soul alone are not enough to
make it comprehensible; it has to be performed, and very well
performed too, to be understood and felt. Now the performance of
a chorus of the size of that is not an easy matter in Paris, and
I would not even risk it without myself conducting the
preliminary rehearsals. While waiting till a favorable
opportunity offers, allow me to tell you that I have been happy
to do this work, and that I trust I have not altogether failed in
it. Were it not for the fear of appearing to you very indiscreet,
I should perhaps venture to trespass on your kindness for the
complete series of these simple, and at the same time sublime,
compositions, of which you alone know the secret. Three other
choruses of the same kind as that of the Blacksmiths, which
should sum up the most poetical methods of human activity, and
which should be called (unless you advise otherwise) Labourers,
Sailors, and Soldiers, would form a lyric epic of which the
genius of Rossini or Meyerbeer would be proud. I know I have no
right to make any such claim, but your kindness to me has always
been so great that I have a faint hope of obtaining this new and
glorious favor. If, however, this work would give you even an
hour's trouble, please consider my request as not having been
made, and pardon me for the regret which I shall feel at this
beautiful idea being unrealized.
As business matters do not necessarily call me to Paris, I prefer
not to return there just now. I expect to go to Bonn in the month
of July, for the inauguration of the Beethoven Monument, and to
have a Cantata performed there which I have written for this
occasion.
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