The attitude of the musical public in this country towards Liszt is at the present day the most unsatisfactory and anomalous feature of the musical situation. It is not possible to name any individual who has done more than Liszt towards creating all that is best in the modern musical world. He created the pianoforte technique without which the later works of Beethoven could never have been performed, he inaugurated a new era of symphonic music by his invention of the Symphonic Poem, and he was the first to understand and interpret Wagner. But we persist in making our historic and traditional mistake. We do not appreciate the continuity of musical art, and we do not value the stimulating and school-forming influences. It is the same now as a hundred and fifty years ago, when we preferred Handel, who never influenced any other composer to good purpose, and who essentially represented the end of a development, to Bach, who is the greatest and most fruitful formative influence of any musical age, and who has powerfully influenced all subsequent composers of genius, except two or three of the Latin races. In the early nineteenth century we made precisely the same mistake in regard to Mendelssohn and Schumann; now we are making it once more by preferring Tchaïkovsky to Strauss. But worse still is our mistake of refusing to listen to Liszt, without whom neither Tchaïkovsky nor Strauss could have existed as musical personages. Once more yesterday the superb Liszt Concerto in E flat was played and received with a kind of tolerance. Very fine playing, the audience seemed to think; but what a pity the composition was not something worth hearing! Yet it is quite the most brilliant and entertaining of Concertos. No person genuinely fond of music was ever known to approach it with an unprejudiced mind and not like it, and--what is more remarkable--the effect of the music on all those who study it with a view to playing it is so great that it invariably overcomes the ancient and deeply-rooted prejudice. But, for the general public, it is not a more notorious fact that Handel's "Messiah" is a great and admirable work than that the original compositions of Liszt are horrible. Consequently, when a work by Liszt is played they do not listen, but resign themselves to be bored; and so even a work like the E flat Concerto, which is quite popular in character and free from anything tormented or obscure, besides being the most brilliant pianoforte Concerto in existence, falls on listless ears and provokes only the half-hearted applause intended exclusively for the soloist. CHAPTER V. WAGNER. [Sidenote: ="Faust in Solitude."= _February 15, 1900._]