Walking the Tightrope

So, for a few days after Tautenburg, Fritz was alone with his mother in the family’s Naumberg home. By this time he had apparently completed putting Lou’s ‘A Prayer to Life’ to music. He probably played his composition for his mother on the family piano. Franziska probably took some interest. This was the first new music from her son since a piano duet he composed as a wedding gift for a lady friend in early 1873. Nine years had passed.  It was good to hear him being musically creative again. For the sake of propriety, Fritz told his mother his time in Tautenburg was spent with Elizabeth and a prospective pupil. It was a complete charade. Fritz loved his mother as dearly as his sister, who he was upset with at the moment. During these days, he doubtlessly considered how to “pitch” the (in his mind) pending intellectual threesome to his mother, so Christian she had married the minister that fathered him. Of course, Fritz’s mother, Franziska, loved her son too. She felt he was...