Anton Rubinstein's librettist, in some reminiscences of his
collaborateur says:
"It must have been in 1840 that I saw Rubinstein for the first time,
when scarcely ten years old; he had travelled in Paris with his teacher,
and plucked his first laurels with his childish hands. It was then that
Franz Liszt, hearing the boy play, and becoming acquainted with his
first compositions, with noble enthusiasm proclaimed him the sole
inheritor of his fame. The prediction has been fulfilled; already in the
fulness of his activity, Liszt recognised in Rubinstein a rival on equal
footing with himself, and since he has ceased to appear before the
public he has greeted Rubinstein as the sole ruler in the realm of
pianists. When Rubinstein was director of the Musical Society in Vienna,
1876, and the elite of the friends of art gathered every week in his
hospitable house, I once had the rare pleasure of hearing him and Liszt
play, not only successively during the same evening, but also together
on the piano. The question, which of the two surpassed the other,
recalled the old problem whether Goethe or Schiller is the greatest
German poet. But when they both sat down to play a new concerto by
Rubinstein, which Liszt, with incredible intuition, read at sight, it
was really as good as a play to watch the gray-haired master, as,
smiling good-naturedly, he followed his young artist, and allowed
himself, as if on purpose, to be surpassed in fervor and enthusiastic
powers."