„Der Himmel weiß! In welchem Geistesstall er sein nächstes Steckenpferd finden wird“ Liszts Interesse an der bildenden Kunst mit den Augen Heines gesehen

In German literature Heinrich Heine is regarded as one of the founders of musical feuilleton, a genre that he developed to the highest mastery with the means of irony and satire. In his music reviews Heine discussed repeatedly many of his musical contemporaries; he met leading composers of his time like Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, Meyerbeer, Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, and Wagner personally. The fact that the relationship between Heine and Liszt (they got to know each other in 1831 in Paris) was not without problems, is a commonplace. Rainer Kleinertz describes it as ambivalent. The essay examines Heine’s musical judgements about Liszt, focussing on the question of Liszt’s interest in the fine arts. In the tenth letter from Über die Französische Bühne. Vertraute Briefe an August Lewald (1837), Heine accused Liszt of philosophical eclecticism, because he would change his beliefs like hobbyhorses. Are there contradictions and inconsistencies also in Liszt’s thinking about art and music that justified such an ambivalent attitude on the part of Heine? Finally, Liszt replied Heine in the seventh of his Lettres d’un bachelier ès musique, dated Venice, 15 April 1838