113 To Louis Kohler
Dear Friend,
I am going once more to give you a pleasure. By today’s post you will receive Richard Wagner’s medallion. A friend of mine, Prince Eugene Sayn-Wittgenstein, modeled it last autumn in Paris, and I consider it the best likeness that exists of Wagner.
A thousand thanks for all the kind things you write and think of me. I very much wish that you should be in agreement with my present and my next work. If I could only dispose of my time better! But it is a wretched misery to have to spend one’s time upon so many useless things and people, when one’s head is quite full of other things!—Well, it must be so. God grant only patience and perseverance! I cannot remember for certain whether I have already sent you the Avant-propos to my Symphonic Poems, which I have in the meantime had printed on the occasion of their performance here. In any case I send them, together with the portrait for which you asked. I am now working at the ninth number (Hungaria)—the eight others are perfectly ready; but it will certainly be next spring before they appear in score.
Of pianoforte music I have nothing more to send you (until the “Annees de Pelerinage” appear at Schott’s), except the little “Berceuse,” which has found a place in the “Nuptial Album” of Haslinger. Perhaps the continuous pedal D-flat will amuse you. The thing ought properly to be played in an American rocking-chair with a Nargileh for accompaniment, in tempo comodissimo con sentimento, so that the player may, willy-nilly, give himself up to a dreamy condition, rocked by the regular movement of the chair-rhythm. It is only when the B-flat minor comes in that there are a couple of painful accents…But why am I talking such nonsense with you?—Your very perspicuous discovery of my intention in the second motive of the Sonata—
[Here, Liszt illustrates with a 2-measure score excerpt from his Sonata]
in contrast with the previous hammer-blows—
[Here, Liszt illustrates with another 2-measure score excerpt from his Sonata, similar to the first excerpt above except the melody is transposed and the rhythm is slightly different]
perhaps led me to it.
Farewell, my dear friend, and remain good to your
F. Liszt
Weymar, June 8th 1854