od fingers, but they were spoiled by a
hammer-like touch and the constant use of forearm, upper-arm, and
shoulder pressure. He called my attention to his tone. Tone! He made
every individual wire jangle, and I trembled for my smooth, well-kept
action. Then he began the _B-minor Ballade_ of Liszt. Now, this
particular piece always exasperates me. If there is much that is
mechanical and conventional in the Thalberg fantasies, at least they are
frankly sensational and admittedly for display. But the Liszt _Ballade_
is so empty, so pretentious, so affected! One expects that something is
about to occur, but it never comes. There are the usual chromatic
modulations leading nowhere and the usual portentous roll in the bass.
The composition works up to as much silly display as ever indulged in by
Thalberg. My pianist splashed and spluttered, played chord-work
straight from the shoulder, and when he had finished he cried out,
"There is a dramatic close for you!"

"I call it mere brutal noise," I replied, and he winked at his friend,
who went to the piano without my invitation. Now, I did not care for the
looks of this one, and I wondered if he, too, would display his biceps
and his triceps with such force. But he was a different brand of the
modern breed. He played with a small, gritty tone, and at a terrible
speed, a foolish and fantastic derangement of Chopin's _D-flat Valse_.
This he followed, at a break-neck _tempo_, with Brahms' dislocation of
Weber's _C major Rondo_, sometimes called "the perpetual movement." It
was all very wonderful, but was it music?

"Gentlemen," I said, as I arose, pipe in hand, "you have both studied,
and studied hard," and they settled themselves in their bamboo chairs
with a look of resignation; "but have you studied well? I think not. I
notice that you lay the weight of your work on the side of technics.
Speed and a brutal _quasi_-orchestral tone seem to be your goal. Where
is the music? Where has the airy, graceful valse of Chopin vanished?
Encased, as you gave it, within hard, unyielding walls of double thirds,
it lost all its spirit, all its evanescent hues. It is a butterfly
caged. And do you call that music, that topsy-turvying of the Weber
_Rondo_? Why, it sounds like a clock that strikes thirteen in the small
hours of the night! And you, sir, with your thunderous and grandiloquent
Liszt _Ballade_, do you call that pianoforte music, that constant
striving for an aping of orchestral effects?