39 To Freund
[Autograph in the possession of Professor Hermann Scholtz in Dresden.]
I am shockingly behindhand with you, my dear Freund, but I won’t make any excuses, although an illness of more than a month comes rather a propos to justify me fully and even more.
Herewith letters and cards for Baron Lannoy (Haslinger will give you the address), for Prince Fritz Schwarzenberg, and for Doctor Uwe, Kriehuber, and Simon Lowy, who will soon be back in Vienna. I shall be glad if you will give them in any case, whether now or later. If you want to give me a pleasure you will go and see my uncle Eduard Liszt, and try to distract him a little.
I detest repeating myself in letters so much that I can’t write over again to you my plans of travel up to the beginning of winter; these I have just told Kroll in full, and you already know them from Hanover.
Teleky, Bethlen (Friends of Liszt’s), and Corracioni are here, and form a kind of colony which I call the Tribe of the Huns!
Probably Teleky will come and pick me up at Weymar towards the middle of February, and we shall go together to Vienna and Pest— not forgetting Temesvar, Debreczin, and Klausenburg!
I hope then to find you in Vienna, and shall perhaps be able to give you a good lift.
Meanwhile acknowledge the receipt of these lines: enjoy yourself, and remain to me always friend Freund. [A play on his name Freund, which means friend.]
Yours most sincerely and affectionately,
F. Liszt
Port Marly, June 11th, 1844.
40. To Franz Von Schober.
Gibraltar, March 3rd, 1845.
Your letter pleases me like a child, my dear good Schober! Everything comes to him who can wait. But I scarcely can wait to congratulate you and to see you again in Weymar [as Councillor of Legation there]. Unhappily it is not probable that I can get there before the end of next autumn. Keep me in your good books, therefore, until then, and accept my best thanks in advance for all you will have done for me and fought for me till then, both in Weymar and in Hungary!
With regard to Vienna, Lowy writes me almost exactly the same as you. To tell the truth I am extremely thankful to the Vienna public, for it was they who, in a critically apathetic moment, roused and raised me [When he came from Venice to Vienna in the spring of 1838, to give a concert for the benefit of his Hungarian compatriots after the inundations, on which occasion, although Thalberg, Clara Wieck, and Henselt had been there before him, he aroused the utmost enthusiasm.]; but still I don’t feel the slightest obligation to return there a year sooner or later. My Vienna journey will pretty much mark the end of my virtuoso career. I hope to go thence (in the month of August, 1846) to Constantinople, and on my return to Italy to pass my dramatic Rubicon or Fiasco.
So much for my settled plans.
What precisely is going to become of me this coming spring and summer I do not exactly know. In any case to Paris I will not go. You know why. My incredibly wretched connection with _____ has perhaps indirectly contributed more than anything to my Spanish-Portuguese tour. I have no reason to regret having come, although my best friends tried to dissuade me from it. Sometimes it seems to me that my thoughts ripen and that my troubles grow prematurely old under the bright and penetrating sun of Spain…
Many kind messages to Eckermann and Wolff. [Professor Wolff, editor of “Der poetische Hausschatz.”] I will write to the latter from the Rhine, where I shall at any rate spend a month this summer (perhaps with my mother and Cosima). If he is still inclined to return to his and your countries (Denmark and Sweden), we can make a nice little trip there as a holiday treat.
Good-bye, my dear excellent friend. Allow me to give you as true a love as I feel is a necessity of my heart! Ever yours,
F. Liszt
What is Villers doing? If you see him tell him to write me a line to Marseilles, care of M. Boisselot, Pianoforte Maker.