ABSTRACT
The writer of this memoir, who unfortunately was on several occasions disappointed of hearing Liszt play, has never tired of collecting the opinions of those who had better fortune. The most valuable estimates would naturally be those of other professional pianists, the more closely contemporary the better. Passing over that of Mendelssohn, which was obviously illiberal and unjust, we have given on p. 110 that of Hiller, who declared him to be beyond criticism, and this was practically the universal judgement. The late Oscar Beringer, who was a pupil of Tausig’s, and certainly heard Liszt for the first time in 1870, says in his Fifty Tears of Experience in Pianoforte Playing:
Words cannot describe him as a pianist; he was incomparable and unapproachable. I have seen whole rows of his audience, men and women alike, affected to tears, when he chose to be pathetic; in stormy passages he was able by his art to work them up to the highest pitch of excitement. Through the medium of his instrument he played upon every human emotion. Rubinstein, Tausig and Bülow all admitted that they were mere children in comparison with Liszt. Wagner said of his rendering of Beethoven’s Sonatas, 122Opus 106 and Opus 111, that “Those who never heard him play them in a friendly circle could not know their real meaning. His was not a re-proauction—it was a re-creation”
And nobody would consider Oscar Beringer a man given to exaggeration, or even enthusiasm.