Viennese grand pianos by Streicher and Bösendorfer, a spinet that had belonged to
Mozart and a piano organ.
Visitors to the Altenburg during the 1850s included Wagner, Berlioz, Brahms, Joseph
Joachim, Joachim Raff, Peter Cornelius, George Eliot and Hans Christian Andersen.
Liszt pupils included Hans von Bülow, Carl Tausig, Dionys Pruckner, Hans von Bronsart
and William Mason. It was at the Altenburg during late 1852 and early 1853 that Liszt
wrote his Piano Sonata in B minor.
Liszt’s second generation of Weimar pupils (1869-1886) studied with him in the
Hofgärtnerei, or court gardener’s house, which was set aside for Liszt’s use after his
return to Weimar in 1869 following an absence of eight years in Rome. This small two-
story house was at the end of Marienstrasse, near Belvedere Allee, and backed on to the
Goethe Park. A large music room occupied most of the first floor with tall windows
overlooking the gardens. A Bechstein grand piano stood in the centre of the room and
there was a small upright piano by G. Höhne, a Weimar maunafacturer, which in 1885
was replaced by the Ibach.
Liszt taught at the Hofgärtnerei for seventeen summers from 1869 until a few weeks
before his death on 31 July 1886. Three afternoons a week a dozen or more pupils would
gather in the music room, first placing the music they wished to play in a pile on top of
the piano. When Liszt entered, someone at the back would whisper ‘Der Meister kommt’.
Everyone would stand respectfully and Liszt would go to the piano and look through the
music. When he found a piece he wanted to hear he would hold it up and ask ‘Who plays
this?’ The owner would then come forward and play and Liszt would make comments
and sometimes play parts of the piece himself. As well as pianists there were composers,
violinists, cellists, singers, painters, poets and scientists. The grand duke and duchess of
Weimar sometimes attended.
Liszt was at pains in his masterclasses to emphasise freedom of expression in the
performance of his own works. He parodied the steady beat of the Leipzig conservatories
and the Clara Schumann school, and often asked his pupils to express in their
performances a scene from nature, an historical incident, an emotion, an idea.
The novelist George Eliot stayed in Weimar and noted in her diary entry of 10 August
1854:
‘My great delight was to watch Liszt and observe the sweetness of his expression.
Genius, benevolence and tenderness beam from his whole countenance, and his manners
are in perfect harmony with it. A little rain sent us into the house, and when we were
seated in an elegant little drawing room, opening into a large music-salon, we had more
reading from Hoffman, and from the French artist who with a tremulous voice pitched in
a minor key, read us some pretty sentimentalities of his own. Then came the thing I had
longed for – Liszt’s playing. For the first time in my life I beheld real inspiration – for the
first time I heard the true tones of the piano. ... There was nothing strange or excessive
about his manner. His manipulation of the instrument was quiet and easy, and his face