Liszt the compiler is a new Liszt. Here the revolutionary remained apart, and the new Liszt came forth, who rushed in undreamed-of splendour through real and imagined worlds. He gathers cultures, a princely collector, with the crown of rare desert upon his head. The world did not know that this same man could pass through times of quiet creation and thought. He is a man of the world of the highest _savoir faire_, a writer of bewitching elegance, a conqueror who makes nought of the boundaries of peoples, a king despising kings, a demigod as conductor of tumultuous musical festivals, and in his works, which seem to appear daily in countless, uncontrollable numbers, a classical combiner of that which is and that which has been. It was he who united composition and interpretation, music and poetry, romance and virtuosity, Olympian and Titan, Beethoven and Paganini. Everything that the piano had experienced, the mystic longings of the old counterpoint, the love of variation of Bird and Bull, the ornamentation of Couperin and Rameau, the sensuous delight in sound of Scarlatti, the absolute art of Bach, the charm and formal beauty of Mozart, the pain of Beethoven crying for release, the intellectual confessions of the unique triumvirate, Schubert, Schumann, and Chopin--the rays of all met in him. A true combiner, he did not jumble these cultures in a learned and academic fashion together in himself, but he developed their common medium, in which they could test their mutual effects, with ever new charms. [Illustration: Liszt in his youth. Lithograph by Kriehuber.]