If ever a man was made to respond to this Paris of 1830 it was Franz Liszt. Heroic virtuosity was a solid half of its Credo. Victor Hugo, as a virtuoso of language, must be placed beside the greatest writers of all time--Homer, Shakespeare, Dante, and whom else? No less can be said for Liszt in regard to the piano. He was born in 1811 in Raiding, Hungary. He is commonly supposed to be partly Hungarian in blood, although German biographers deny this, asserting that the name originally had the common German form of List. Almost before he could walk he was at the piano. At the age of nine he appeared in public. And at the age of twelve he was a pianist of international reputation. How such virtuosity came to be, no one can explain. Most things in music can be traced in some degree to their causes. But in such a case as this the miracle can be explained neither by his instruction nor by his parentage nor by any external conditions. It is one of the things that must be set down as a pure gift of Heaven. Prominent noblemen guaranteed his further education and, after a few months of study in Vienna, under Czerny and Salieri, he and his father went to Paris, which was to be the centre of his life for some twenty years. He was the sensation of polite Paris within a few months after his arrival and he presently had pupils of noble blood at outrageous prices. Two years after his arrival--that is, when he was fourteen--a one-act operetta of his, _Don Sanche_, was performed at the Académie Royale. Two years later his father died and he was thrown on his own resources as teacher and concert pianist. Then, in 1830, he fell sick following an unhappy love affair, and his life was despaired of until, in the words of his mother, ‘he was cured by the sound of the cannon.’ How did the Paris of 1830, and particularly the temper of Parisian life, affect Liszt? ‘Monsieur Mignet,’ he said, ‘teach me all of French literature.’ Here is a new thing in music--a musician who dares take all knowledge to be his province. He writes, about this time: ‘For two weeks my mind and my fingers have been working like two of the damned: Homer, the Bible, Plato, Locke, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine, Chateaubriand, Beethoven, Bach, Hummel, Mozart, Weber are about me. I study them, meditate them, devour them furiously.’ He conceived a huge admiration for Hugo’s _Marion de Lorme_ and Schiller’s _Wilhelm Tell_. Be sure, too, that he was busy reading the artistic theories of the romanticists and translating them into musical terms. The revolution of 1830 had immediate concrete results in his music; he sketched a Revolutionary Symphony, part of which later became incorporated into his symphonic poem, _Heroïde Funèbre_. He made a brilliant arrangement of the _Marseillaise_ and wrote the first number of his ‘Years of Pilgrimage’ on the insurrection of the workmen at Lyon.