n which the
perfumed flower of the composer's thoughts is never smothered by
passage-work. Consider the delicious etude _Au bord d'une Source_, or
the _Sonnets After Petrarch_, or those beautiful concert-studies in
D-flat, F-minor, and A-flat; are they not models of genuine piano-music!
The settings of Schubert marches Hanslick declared are marvels; and the
_Transcendental Studies!_ Are not keyboard limitations compassed?
Chopin, a sick man physically, never dared as did Liszt. One was an
aeolian-harp, the other a hurricane. I never attempted to play these
studies in their revised form; I content myself with the first sketches
published as an opus 1. There the nucleus of each etude may be seen.
Later Liszt expanded the _croquis_ into elaborate frescoes. And yet they
say that he had no thematic invention!

Take up his B-minor sonata. Despite its length, an unheavenly length, it
is one of the great works of piano-literature fit to rank with
Beethoven's most sublime sonatas. It is epical. Have you heard Friedheim
or Burmeister play it? I had hoped that Liszt would vouchsafe me a
performance, but you have seen that I had not the courage to return to
him. Besides, I wasn't invited. Once in Paris a Liszt pupil, George
Leitert, played for me the _Dante Sonata_, a composition I heard thirty
years later from the fingers of Arthur Friedheim. It is the _Divine
Comedy_ compressed within the limits of a piano-piece. What folly, I
hear some one say! Not at all. In several of Chopin's Preludes--his
supreme music--I have caught reflections of the sun, the moon, and the
starry beams that one glimpses in lonely midnight pools. If Chopin could
mirror the cosmos in twenty bars, why should not a greater tone-poet
imprison behind the bars of his music the subtle soul of Dante?

To view the range, the universality of Liszt's genius, it is only
necessary to play such a tiny piano-composition, _Eclogue_, from _Les
Annees de Pelerinage_ and then hear his _Faust Symphony_, his _Dante
Symphony_, his Symphonic Poems. There's a man for you! as Abraham
Lincoln once said of Walt Whitman. After carefully listening to the
_Faust Symphony_ it dawns on you that you have heard all this music
elsewhere, filed out, triturated, cut into handy, digestible fragments;
in a word, dressed up for operatic consumption, popularized. Yes,
Richard Wagner dipped his greedy fingers into Liszt's scores as well as
into his purse. He borrowed from the pure Rhinegold hoard