Reflections on Liszt by Alan Walker

Author:Alan Walker [Walker, Alan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2017-12-15T02:00:00+00:00

by a mere eighteen months. He died after a brief illness at his home, 17, Eastbourne Terrace, Hyde Park, on March 26, 1888. According to his sister Constance he contracted a chill and developed an ulcerated throat but was otherwise not in poor health. He was actually teaching at the Academy on the 23rd, and gave private lessons at home on the 24th. Two days later he was dead. He was not yet forty-six years old. The funeral was delayed for five days and the cortege finally set out on the rather long journey from Eastbourne Terrace to Hampstead Cemetery (a traditional burial site for London-based Unitarians) on March 31. On March 28, the London Times had already carried an appreciative obituary notice of Bache. It paid tribute to the financial sacrifices he had made in support of Liszt across the years, and acknowledged his value as a teacher. But it offered faint praise for his career as a performer. “As a pianist,” the obituary ran, “Mr. Bache represented the school to which he belonged, and although he did not play with the brilliancy of Sophie Menter, Stavenhagen, and other of Liszt’s pupils, his earnestness of purpose, his energy and his unswerving study made up for the comparative want of what Liszt would have called the feu sacré.” The obituary was unsigned, but we suspect the hand of Francis Hueffer, who had succeeded J. W. Davison at the Times on the latter’s retirement in 1879. For Hueffer, a former pupil of Schopenhauer and an avid supporter of Wagner, Bache was a good soldier who lacked “the sacred fire.”33

Five weeks after Bache’s death, his sister Constance donated some memorabilia to the Royal Academy of Music from his estate. The materials included some music from his library and a photograph of Liszt which had hung for several years in his study at Eastbourne Terrace.34 Constance was determined not to let the memory of her brother fade, and devoted herself to an English translation of the first two volumes of Liszt’s collected correspondence, which included a number of important letters from Liszt to Bache.35 She also wrote her affectionate memoir of Walter, in which the full extent of his many sacrifices for Liszt were made public for the first time.36

Bache was a saint. Without him Liszt’s music would have gone under in Victorian England. All honor to his memory!

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