“The musical services were of an interesting character on account of the well known excellence of the choir, the skill of the organist, Mr. Louis Dachauer, and the first performance in this country of Liszt’s Coronation Mass, which he wrote a few years ago for the Emperor of Austria on occasion of his coronation at Pesth as King of Hungary. The choir which rendered it yesterday was small in numbers, but certainly trained in every school of church music. Of all the extravagances of which the Abbate Liszt has been guilty in music, we conceive his mass to be the most daring. There is hardly a sane thought in it, from beginning to end, except in the ‘Credo,’ and that belongs to Dumont, being a plain chant of the most orthodox kind. Liszt, it appears, was very much hurried in the composition of this mass, and he borrowed Dumont’s Gregorian ‘Credo,’ without, however, giving credit to this old, revered writer. To describe the ‘Gloria,’ ‘Sanctus’ and ‘Agnus Dei’ would be a useless task, as, in a musical point of view, they represent chaos. The ‘Gloria’ is a succession of screaming discords, for which there can be no legitimate excuse, and the ‘Sanctus’ is even worse. The organist, Mr. Dachauer, and the singers struggled bravely with their unpalatable task, but against such a mass of discord there was no hope. Such a work is an insult to music, and we marvel if the Crown of Hungary can sit comfortably on the imperial head with the memory of such an inauguration torturing the brain beneath it. Liszt, as a composer of church music, cannot be tolerated where respect for art is entertained.”