fined with a degree of clearness
and sharpness that almost hurt the eye; as in a stereoscope, there was
neither colour nor suggestiveness. An orchestral virtuoso, like a
piano or violin virtuoso, may over-practise.

Having delivered this verdict with all solemnity, I must straightway
proceed to hedge. If Lamoureux had not the qualities which give
Richter and Mottl their pre-eminence, he had qualities which they do
not possess, and his playing had qualities which one cannot find in
theirs. If he had not absolutely a genius for music, he certainly had
a genius for attaining perfection in all he did, which was perhaps the
next best thing. I imagine that he would have made a mouse-trap or
built a cathedral exactly as he played a Beethoven symphony. The mouse
would never escape from the trap; there would be nothing wanting, down
to the most modern appliances and conveniences, in the cathedral. In
the Fifth symphony he gave us every minute nuance in rigid obedience
to the composer's directions or evident intentions, and gave them with
a fastidious care strangely in contrast with Mottl's rough-and-ready
brilliancy or Richter's breadth. He began every crescendo on the
precise note where Beethoven marked it to begin; and he gradated it
with geometrical faultlessness to the exact note where Beethoven
marked it to cease. In diminuendos and accelerandos and ritenutos he
was just as faithful. In the softer portions his sforzandos were not
irrelevant explosions, but slight extra accents: he made microscopic
distinctions between piano and pianissimo; he achieved the most
difficult feat of keeping his band at a level forte through long
passages without a symptom of breaking out into fortissimo. His
players treated the stiffest passages in the "Dutchman" overture as if
they were baby's play; and I detected hardly a wrong note either in
that or in the Fifth symphony. In a word, nothing to compare with the
technical perfection of his renderings, or his unswerving loyalty to
the composer, has been heard in London in my time. Yet, by reason of
that very prodigious correctness, the "Dutchman" overture seemed bare
and comparatively lifeless: the roar and the hiss of the storm were
absent, and the shrill discordant wail of wind in the cordage; one
heard, not the wail or the hiss or the roar, but the notes which--in
our crude scale with its arbitrary division into tones and
half-tones--Wagner had perforce to use to suggest them. There was even