to Berlioz in many respects; we feel the same natural
tendency to derive musical inspiration from external sources, poetic,
pictorial or from the realm of Nature. Purely as a musician, however,
Liszt was far greater, with a wider vocabulary and more power in
thematic development. His work also is somewhat uneven; moments of
real beauty alternating with passages which are trivial, bombastic or
mere lifeless padding. When we bear in mind Liszt's unparalleled
versatility, his output in quantity and variety is so amazing--there
being well over 1,000 works of about every kind--that it is unfair to
expect the style to be as finely wrought as the original conception is
noble. A serious and unbiased study of his best compositions will
convince one that Liszt is entitled to high rank as a musician of
genuine poetic inspiration. The average music-lover is prone to dwell
upon him as the composer of _Les Preludes_, the _Hungarian
Rhapsodies_, and as the somewhat flashy transcriber of operatic
potpourris, such as the _Rigoletto Fantasie_. But _Les Preludes_,
notwithstanding a certain charm and the clever manner in which the
music (without becoming minutely descriptive) supplements the poem of
Lamartine, is yet barred from the first rank by its mawkishness of
sentiment and by its cloying harmonies. The most significant among the
symphonic poems are _Orpheus_ with its characteristic crescendos and
diminuendos; _Tasso_ of great nobility and pathos, and _Mazeppa_, a
veritable tour de force of descriptive writing. To hear any one of
these masterpieces can not fail to alter the opinion of those who may
have considered Liszt as exclusively given over to sensational
effects. As for the _Hungarian Rhapsodies_, which Liszt intended as a
kind of national ballade and so, for the basic themes and rhythms,
drew largely on Hungarian Folk music, here again the public, with its
fondness for being dazzled, has laid exclusive stress on the flashy
ones to the detriment of those containing much that is noble and of
enduring worth. In his transcriptions of standard songs Liszt did as
valuable a public service as any popularizer, and has thereby made
familiar the melodies of Schubert and Schumann to hundreds who
otherwise would know nothing of them. In considering Liszt's
pianoforte works we must remember that he was a born virtuoso with a
natural fondness for exploiting the possibilities of his instrument,
and with an amazing technique as a performer. Wh