Oh, magnificent and miserable Abbé Liszt! Strange and unnatural fusion of traits the most noble and the most mean! One can scarcely say which was the stronger in you, the grand seigneur or the base comedian. For in your work they are equally, inextricably commingled. In your art it is the actor who thrones it in the palace hall, the great lord of music who struts and capers on the boards of the itinerant theater. Nowhere, in all music, is grandeur nigher to the dust, and nowhere does the dust reveal more grandiose traits. Your compositions are the most brilliant of bastards, the most lamentable of legitimate things. They smite us with both admiration and aversion, affect us as though the scarlet satin robes of a patrician of Venice were to betray the presence beneath them of foul, unsightly rags. They remind us of the façades of the palaces of Vicenza, which, designed by the pompous and classicizing Palladio, are executed in stucco and other cheap materials.
And yet, the many works in which you do not show yourself the artist reveal the plenitude of your powers almost as much as the few in which you do. The most empty of your many ostentatious orchestral soliloquies, the most feeble of your many piano-pyrotechnics, the iciest of your bouquets of icy, exploding stars, the brassiest of your blatant perorations, the very falsest of your innumerable paste jewels, declare that you were born to sit among the great ones of your craft. For they reveal you the indubitable virtuosic genius. The very cleverness of the imitation of the precious stone betrays how deep a sense of the beauty of the real gem you had, how expert you were in the trade of diamond cutter. Into the shaping of your bad works of art there went a temperament, a playfulness, a fecundity, a capriciousness, a genius that many better artists have not possessed.
You were indeed profusely endowed, showered with musical gifts as some cradled prince might be showered with presents and honors. Everything in your personality was grand, seigneurial, immense in scale. You were born musical King of Cyprus and Jerusalem and Armenia, titular sovereign of vast, unclaimed realms. Few composers have been more inventive. No composer has ever scattered abroad ideas with more liberal hand. Compositions like the B-minor piano-sonata, the tone-poem "Mazeppa," the "Dante" symphony, whatever their artistic value, fairly teem with original themes of a high order, are like treasure houses in which gold ornaments lie negligently strewn in piles. Indeed, your inventive power supplied not only your own compositions with material, but those of your son-in-law, Richard Wagner, as well. As James Huneker once so brightly put it, "Wagner was indebted to you for much besides money, sympathy, and a wife." For Siegmund and Sieglinde existed a long while in your "Dante" symphony before Wagner transferred them to "Die Walküre"; Parsifal and Kundry a long while in your piano-sonata before he introduced them into his "Bühnenweihfestspiel."