of
Beethoven. The first movement and the _Adagio_, above all, are of
incomparable beauty. To say that Liszt played it, and that he played
it in a fashion grand, fine, poetic, yet always faithful, is to make a
veritable pleonasm, and there was a tumult of applause, a sound of
trumpets, and _fanfares_ of the orchestra, which must have been heard
far beyond the limits of the hall. Liszt immediately afterward mounted
the desk of the conductor to direct the performance of the symphony in
C minor, which he made us hear as Beethoven wrote it, including the
entire _scherzo_, without the abridgment, as we have so long been
accustomed to hear at the Conservatory at Paris; and the finale, with
the repeat indicated by Beethoven. I have always had such confidence
in the taste of the correctors of the great masters that I was very
much surprised to find the symphony in C minor still more beautiful
when executed entirely than when corrected. It was necessary to go to
Bonn to make this discovery."

In 1849 a new epoch was opened in the history of this remarkable man.
The grand duke of Weimar invited him to assume the direction of his
musical establishment, including the opera. The salary was absurdly
small--$800 or $1,000 a year. This, however, cut no figure in Liszt's
mind, for he had always been singularly open-handed, yet at same time
prudent. From his successful concert tours he had put by funds, 20,000
francs for his aged mother, and 20,000 francs for each of the three
children he had by the Countess D'Agoult (known in literature as
Daniel Stern), and he considered that the position would afford him an
opportunity of developing his own talent for composition, and at the
same time of affording a hearing for important new works, which, on
account of their novelty and originality, were impossible of
performance in the theaters of large cities. The repertory of the
Weimar opera, from this time on, was most extraordinary. Here were
produced for the first time Wagner's "Flying Dutchman,"
"_Tannhaeuser_," and "_Lohengrin_," "_Benvenuto Cellini_," of Berlioz,
Schumann's "_Genoveva_" and "_Mannfred_," and Schubert's "Alfonso and
Estrella." Here were produced, also, the best of the operas of
previous generations. Every master work of this sort Liszt revised
with the greatest care, giving endless patience to every detail, and
supplementing the resources of the theater, when insufficient, by
"guests" from the great operas in the capital. Thu