From 1833 to 1848--when he gave up playing in public--he was greeted with frantic applause as the prince of pianists. Five years (1835-1840) were spent in Switzerland and Italy, in semi-retirement in the company of Madame la comtesse d'Agoult (George Sand's friend and would-be rival, known in literary circles as "Daniel Stern," by whom Liszt had three children, one of them afterwards Frau Cosima Wagner): these years were devoted to further study in playing and composition, and were interrupted only by occasional appearances at Geneva, Milan, Florence and Rome, and by annual visits to Paris, when a famous contest with Thalberg took place in 1837. The enthusiasm aroused by Liszt's playing and his personality--the two are inseparable--reached a climax at Vienna and Budapest in 1839-1840, when he received a patent of nobility from the emperor of Austria, and a sword of honour from the magnates of Hungary in the name of the nation. During the eight years following he was heard at all the principalcentres--including London, Leipzig, Berlin, Copenhagen, St Petersburg, Moscow, Warsaw, Constantinople, Lisbon and Madrid. He gained much money, and gave large sums in charity. His munificence with regard to the Beethoven statue at Bonn made a great stir. The subscriptions having come in but sparsely, Liszt took the matter in hand, and the monument was completed at his expense, and unveiled at a musical festival conducted by Spohr and himself in 1845. In 1848 he settled at Weimar with Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein (d. 1887), and remained there till 1861. During this period he acted as conductor at court concerts and on special occasions at the theatre, gave lessons to a number of pianists, wrote articles of permanent value on certain works of Berlioz and the early operas of Wagner, and produced those orchestral and choral pieces upon which his reputation as a composer mainly depends. His ambition to found a school of composers as well as a school of pianists met with complete success on the one hand and partial failure on the other. His efforts on behalf of Wagner, who was then an exile in Switzerland, culminated in the first performance of _Lohengrin_ on the 28th of August 1850, before a special audience assembled from far and near. Among the works produced for the first time or rehearsed with a view to the furtherance of musical art were Wagner's _Tannhäuser_, _Der fliegende Holländer_, _Das Liebesmahl der Apostel_, and _Eine Faust Overtüre_, Berlioz's _Benvenuto Cellini_, the _Symphonie Fantastique_, _Harold en Italie_, _Roméo et Juliette_, _La Damnation de Faust_, and _L'Enfance du Christ_--the last two conducted by the composer--Schumann's _Genoveva_, _Paradise and the Peri_, the music to _Manfred_ and to _Faust_, Weber's _Euryanthe_, Schubert's _Alfonso und Estrella_, Raff's _König Alfred_, Cornelius's _Der Barbier von Baghdad_ and many more. It was Liszt's habit to recommend novelties to the public by explanatory