Page:Anecdotes of Great Musicians.djvu/170

158 One of the circumstances that made him dislike England was an experience he had in London. One night, in the midst of a brilliant concert, a respectable citizen arose from his seat, and facing the audience, interrupted the proceedings with the following impromptu speech:

"Gentlemen, do you not blush at spending a guinea to come and hear a miserable player, a mountebank, who knows only how to get sounds out of a wooden box, mounted with catgut? Could you not make better use of your money? Would you not do better to give it to the poor? Look at that big charlatan, who is just like the devil; he laughs at your simplicity and puts your money into his pockets. You are a set of fools!"

Hardly had he finished this tirade, when Paganini, greatly frightened and thinking he was followed by assassins, had fled from the concert hall and was on his way to Manchester.  

In 1837 a certain charitably disposed Princess hit on a novel way to gather in money for the homeless Italian patriots then in Paris. Her plan was to bring into the musical market a composition which should be the combined work of six of the greatest pianists then before the world.

The theme that was chosen was a duet from Bellini's "I Puritani," and the composers who took part in this composite composition were Liszt, Thalberg, Pixis, Herz, Czerny, and Chopin—a brilliant array. From the number of composers this work was called the "Hexameron." Each one wrote a variation on the given theme and Liszt furnished the introduction and finale.

This was not the first time that Liszt had taken part in such composition. In 1823 Diabelli, the Vienna music publisher, issued a series of fifty variations on a waltz theme, by fifty prominent composers of the time. Among them were Czerny, Hummel, Kalkbrenner,