Reactions from Alan Walker's lecture on "Liszt: The Cultural Ambassador":

Spending three years at Yale University breeds a distinctive small town mentality that consistently favors a German musical bias. The entire faculty at Yale, as I've come to realize, is so incredibly vehement against non-German music that after awhile, you almost seem to believe that composers such as Liszt and Rachmaninoff really do cater only to the ignorant and uneducated. Today, I was thankfully sucked back into reality with a lecture that truly proves the contrary.

The ignorant and uneducated, as I've come to learn, are the professors at Yale. Bold statement, I know.

Alan Walker, who has quickly come to be regarded as the foremost guru on the life of Franz Liszt (he spent 25 years researching him), yesterday presented one of the most enlightening and inspiring lectures I've ever attended. The lecture presented Liszt as the ultimate humanitarian, the true gentleman, the intellectual, the impresario, the writer, the reader, the transcriber, the performer, the poet, the painter, the radical, the conservative, and of course, the composer.

Perhaps more than any finer point of the lecture was truly the annihilation of the Elvis-esque stereotype that seems to perpetually shadow Liszt's image - yesterday, it was replaced with that of the quintessential moralist and humanitarian. Liszt was Horowitz, Maynard Solomon, Richard Taruskin, Martha Argerich, John Cage, and yes, Elvis Presley, all beautifully rolled into the enigma that clouds history today.

Sad that Yale shall probably forever remain in its cultural bubble, content to live life amongst the snobbery of conservative German Romantics and the serialism of post-war expressionists. There is more to life than Brahms and Schoenberg, and to deny this is to live a truly unhappy life.

Robert and Clara Schumann once hosted a dinner party their residence, to which the likes of Berlioz, Brahms, Liszt, and Wagner were invited. Liszt and Wagner, in classic renaissance charm, arrived two hours late; half-drunk, of course. Liszt proceeded to shpeal on a tirade insulting the music of Mendelssohn as elementary, at which point an angered Robert Schumann approached him and struck him on the chest, just before storming upstairs in a rage.

Franz Liszt, with the charm and a smile, told Clara, "Please inform your huband that he is the only musician whom I respect enough to tolerate such behavior."