at
Liszt was without merit, but I do assert that he should have left the
piano a piano, and not tried to transform it to a miniature orchestra.

Let us consider some of his compositions.

Liszt began with machine-made fantasias on faded Italian operas--not,
however, faded in his time. He devilled these as does the culinary
artist the crab of commerce. He peppered and salted them and then giving
for a background a real New Jersey thunderstorm, the concoction was
served hot and smoking. Is it any wonder that as Mendelssohn relates,
the Liszt audience always stood on the seats to watch him dance through
the _Lucia_ fantasia? Now every school girl jigs this fatuous stuff
before she mounts her bicycle.

And the new critics, who never heard Thalberg, have the impertinence to
flout him, to make merry at his fantasias. Just compare the _Don Juan_
of Liszt and the _Don Juan_ of Thalberg! See which is the more musical,
the more pianistic. Liszt, after running through the gamut of operatic
extravagance, began to paraphrase movements from Beethoven symphonies,
bits of quartets, Wagner overtures and every nondescript thing he could
lay his destructive hands on. How he maltreated the _Tannhaeuser_
overture we know from Josef Hofmann's recent brilliant but ineffectual
playing of it. Wagner, being formless and all orchestral color, loses
everything by being transferred to the piano. Then, sighing for fresh
fields, the rapacious Magyar seized the tender melodies of Schubert,
Schumann, Franz and Brahms and forced them to the block. Need I tell you
that their heads were ruthlessly chopped and hacked? A special art-form
like the song that needs the co-operation of poetry is robbed of
one-half its value in a piano transcription. By this time Liszt had
evolved a style of his own, a style of shreds and patches from the
raiment of other men. His style, like Joseph's coat of many colors,
appealed to pianists because of its factitious brilliancy.

The cement of brilliancy Liszt always contrived to cover his most
commonplace compositions with. He wrote etudes _a la_ Chopin; clever, I
admit, but for my taste his Opus One, which he afterwards dressed up
into _Twelve Etudes Transcendentales_--listen to the big, boastful
title!--is better than the furbished up later collection. His three
concert studies are Chopinish; his _Waldesrauschen_ is pretty, but leads
nowhere; his _Annees des Pelerinage_ sickly with sentimentalism; his
_Dante Sonata_ a ho