Aside from the great mental grasp, the opulent imagination, the fire and passion, the dazzling technical skill of the player, there was a vivid personality in Liszt as a man which captivated audiences.  This element dominated his slightest action.  He strode over the concert stage with the haughty step of a despot who ruled with a sway not to be contested.  Tearing his gloves from his fingers and hurling them on the piano, he would seat himself with a proud gesture, run 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.