[...] Not long ago I was carried off to the country-seat of a Hungarian family, that of Count Nakö, who prides himself on having been the first and most ardent devotee of my music in Vienna. A young and amiable man, Prince Rudolph Liechtenstein, who, on the way, called for his equally estimable and very gentle wife, escorted me to Schwarzau, at the foot of a high mountain range. It is a wonderful situation. The plains, if they were filled with water, might easily remind one of a Swiss lake. The castle was furnished in quite unusual taste and betrayed a most curious and fanciful mind in choice, arrangement and invention. The countess, a lady nearing the end of her thirtieth year, has startlingly intelligent great black eyes, and is famous for her very original natural gift for music. She keeps a troop of gipsies as her private band of musicians, accompanies them on the pianoforte and improvises the most marvellous stuff with them for hours on end. I feared that I should find affectation in her emotionalism, but her mien soon reassured me. [...] The gipsy band were for the moment in Hungary, so the countess tried to give us an idea of the music she makes with them on the pianoforte alone. It was very original and arresting. Soon she began to bring in motifs from Lohengrin, and so at last I, too, had to sit down to the instrument. I was delighted with the lovely silence with which it was all received. Only the count, a slim handsome Hungarian of the authentic breed, felt obliged to tell me numerous stories of the impression created by my works. I suffered it all very patiently because he related the gist of remarks heard about me with incredible good-nature. In young Liechtenstein I recognised a touching melancholy [...]
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner, Vol. 2, selected and ed. Wilhelm Altmann, trans. M. M. Bozman (J. M. Dent & Sons, 1927), No. 498