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 overcome all scruples.  The first year of these art travels was made memorable by the great inundation of the Danube, which caused so much suffering at Pesth.  Thousands of people were rendered homeless, and the scene was one that appealed piteously to the humanitarian mind.  The heart of Franz Liszt burned with sympathy, and he devoted the proceeds of his concerts for nearly two months to the alleviation of the woes of his countrymen.  A princely sum was contributed by the artist, which went far to assist the sufferers.  The number of occasions on which Liszt gave his services to charity was legion.  It is credibly stated that the amount of benefactions contributed by his benefit concerts, added to the immense sums which he directly disbursed, would have made him several times a millionaire.

The blaze of enthusiasm which Liszt kindled made his track luminous throughout the musical centers of Europe.  Caesar-like, his very arrival was a victory, for it aroused an indescribable ferment of agitation, which rose at his concerts to wild excesses.  Ladies of the highest rank tore their gloves to strips in the ardor of their applause, flung their jewels on the stage instead of bouquets, shrieked in ecstasy and sometimes fainted, and made a wild rush for the stage at the close of the music to see Liszt, and obtain some of the broken strings of the piano, which the artist had ruined in the heat of his play, as precious relics of the occasion.  The stories told of the Liszt craze among the ladies of Germany and Russia are highly amusing, and have a value as registering the degree of the effect he produced on impressible minds.  Even sober and judicious critics who knew well whereof they spoke yielded to the contagion.  Schumann writes of him, apropos of his Dresden and Leipzig concerts in 1840:  “The whole audience greeted his appearance with an enthusiastic storm of applause, and then he began to play.  I had heard him before, but an artist is a different thing in the presence of the public compared with what he appears in the presence of a few.  The fine open space, the glitter of light, the elegantly dressed audience—­all this elevates the frame of mind in the giver and receiver.  And now the demon’s power began to awake; he first played with the public as if to try it, then gave it something more profound, until every single member was enveloped in his art; and then the whole mass began to rise and fall precisely as he willed it.  I never found any artist except Paga-nini to possess in so high a degree this power of subjecting, elevating, and leading the public.  It is an instantaneous variety of wildness, tenderness, boldness, and airy grace; the instrument glows under the hand of its