The years which Liszt passed with the Princess at the Altenburg, and when he was most directly under her influence, were the most glorious in his career.  Besides the “Faust” symphony, he composed during this period the twelve symphonic poems, thus originating a new and highly important musical form, which may be said to bear, in their liberation from pedantry, the same relation to the set symphony that the music drama does to opera; the “Rhapsodies Hongroises;” his piano sonata and concertos; the “Graner Messe;” and the beginnings of his “Christus” and “Legend of the Holy Elizabeth.”  The Princess ordered the household arrangements in such a way that the composer should not be disturbed in his work.  No one was admitted to him without her vise; she attended to the voluminous correspondence which, with a man of so much natural courtesy as Liszt, would have occupied an enormous amount of his time.  He was the acknowledged head of the Wagner movement, at that time regarded as nothing short of revolutionary; he was looked upon as the friend of all progressive propaganda in his art; to play for Liszt, to have his opinion on performance or composition, was the ambition of every musical celebrity, or would-be one; his cooperation in innumerable concerts and music festivals was sought for.  His was a name to conjure with.  Between him and these assaults on his almost proverbial kindness stood the Princess, and the list of his great musical productions during this period, to say nothing of his literary work, like the rhapsody on Chopin, is the tale of what the world owes her for her devotion.  The relations between Liszt and the Princess were frankly acknowledged, and by the world as frankly accepted, as if they were two exceptional beings in whom one could pardon things which in the case of ordinary mortals would mean social ostracism.  The nearest approach to this situation was that of George Eliot and Lewes.  But with Liszt and his Princess the world, possibly after the fashion of the Continent, was far more lenient, and their lives in their outward aspects were far more brilliant.  No exalted mind in literature, music, art or science passed through Weimar, or came near it, without being drawn to the Altenburg as by a magnet.  There seems to have been within its walls an almost uninterrupted intellectual revel, or, to use a trite expression, which here is most apt, a steady feast of reason and flow of soul.  The sojourn of Liszt and the Princess in the Altenburg was a “golden period” for Weimar, a revival of the time when Goethe lived there and reflected his glory upon it.

[Illustration:  The Altenburg, Weimar, where Liszt and Carolyne lived.]

And yet—­convention is the result of the concentrated essence of the experience of ages; and no one seems able to break through it without the effort leaving a scar.  It cast its shadow even over the life at the Altenburg.  There remained one great longing to the Princess, the nonfulfilment of which was as a void in her soul.  She yearned to bear the name of the man she adored.  During the twelve years of their Weimar sojourn she battled for it, but in vain.  Then she transferred the battlefield to Rome.