his fingers
through his waving blonde locks, and then attack the piano with the
vehemence of a conqueror taking his army into action. Much of this
manner was probably the outcome of natural temperament, something the
result of affectation; but it helped to add to the glamour with which
Liszt always held his audiences captive. When he left Paris for a
studious retirement at Geneva, the throne became vacant. By and by there
came a contestant for the seat, a player no less remarkable in many
respects than Liszt himself, Sigismond Thalberg, whose performances
aroused Paris, alert for a new sensation, into an enthusiasm which
quickly mounted to boiling heat. Humors of the danger threatened to his
hitherto acknowledged ascendancy reached Liszt in his Swiss retreat. The
artist's ambition was stirred to the quick; he could not sleep at night
with the thought of this victorious rival who was snatching his laurels,
and he hastened back to Paris to meet Thalberg on his own ground.
The latter, however, had already left Paris, and Liszt only felt the
ground-swell of the storm he had raised. There was a hot division of
opinion among the Parisians, as there had been in the days of Gluck and
Piccini. Society was divided into Lisztians and Thalbergians, and to
indulge in this strife was the favorite amusement of the fashionable
world. Liszt proceeded to reestablish his place by a series of
remarkable concerts, in which he introduced to the public some of the
works wrought out during his retirement, among them transcriptions from
the songs of Schubert and the symphonies of Beethoven, in which the most
free and passionate poetic spirit was expressed through the medium of
technical difficulties in the scoring before unknown to the art of the
piano-forte. There can be no doubt that the influence of Thalberg's
rivalry on Liszt's mind was a strong force, and suggested new
combinations. Without having heard Thalberg, our artist had already
divined the secret of his effects, and borrowed from them enough to give
a new impulse to an inventive faculty which was fertile in expedients
and quick to assimilate all things of value to the uses of its own
insatiable ambition.

Franz Liszt's career as a traveling virtuoso commenced in 1837, and
lasted for twelve years. Hitherto he had resisted the impulsion to
such a course, all his desires rushing toward composition, but the
extraordinary rewards promised cooperated with the spur of rivalry to
overcom