LOVE LETTER: Franz Liszt to Countess D’Agoult

My heart overflows with emotion and joy! I do not know what heavenly languor, what infinite pleasure permeates it and burns me up.
It is as if I had never loved! Tell me whence these uncanny disturbances spring, these inexpressible foretastes  of delight,
these divine, tremors of love. Oh! all this can only spring from you angel, woman, Marie!
All this can only be, is surely nothing less than a gentle ray streaming from your fiery soul,
or else some secret poignant teardrop which you have long since left in my breast.

What is certain is that my love, my veneration for you does nothing but increase
and that your word ever and always will be the sole regulator of my actions.
My God, my God, never force us apart, take pity on us! But what am I saying? Forgive my weakness,
how couldst Thou divide us! Thou wouldst have nothing but pity for us. No! no!
It is not in vain that our flesh and our souls quicken and become immortal which cries out deep within us.
This is to be — to be! Marie! Marie!

Oh let me repeat that name a hundred times, a thousand times over; for three days now it has lived within me,
oppressed me, set me afire. I am not writing to you, no, I am close beside you. I see you, I hear you.
Eternity in your arms; Heaven, Hell, everything, all is within you, redoubled. Oh! Leave me free to rave in my delirium.
Drab, tame, constricting reality is no longer enough for me.
Oh! you believe me capable of self-sacrifice, chastity, temperance and piety, do you not?
But let no more be said of this. It is for you to question, to draw conclusions, to save me as you see fit.
Let me be mad, senseless This is to be!
We must live our lives to the full, loving and suffering to extremes!…
Marie! Marie!
Mean, cautious, narrow reality is no longer enough for me. We must live out lives to the full, our loves, our sorrow!

When the ideal form of a woman floats before your dreaming soul,
a woman whose heaven-born charms bear no allurement for the senses, but only wing the soul to devotion,
and if you saw at her side sincere and faithful heart, weave these forms into a moving story of love
I have tried to portray in music a few of my strongest sensations and most lively impression.


Franz