oped a strength which seemed
excessive to the aristocratic hearers constituting the main portion of
his audiences. Presently, however, the honors of the competition went
to Liszt, where they have ever since remained.

Liszt had the good fortune to divine the future course of piano
development, as also did Schumann. Both took for the strategic center
of the piano the principle of what has been called the "differential
touch," or discrimination in touch, by means of which not only long
passages of different kinds were discriminated from one another, as in
the Thalbergian melodies and their surrounding arabesques, but the
infinitely finer discriminations which take place within the phrase,
and especially in chord playing, where at least one tone of the chord
belongs to the melodic thread, and as such receives an emphasis, or at
least a distinctness of delivery, to which the remainder of the chord
has no claim whatever. Moreover, while Thalberg employed the
pedal,--and it was, in fact, an indispensable condition of the effect
of his pieces,--he did not rightly consider what would be the effect
when the piano should be developed to a sonority and continuance of
vibration which in his time it did not have. Schumann and Liszt
recognized the inner significance of the pedal, and wrote their works
with reference to what we might call perhaps a sort of pianoforte
chiaro-oscuro (luminous-indistinctness), which inevitably follows when
the pedal is rapidly employed in quickly moving chords. In many of the
Schumann pieces this is one of the most notable elements of the tonal
beauty, and it is the underlying condition of the successful
performance of nearly or quite all of the great Liszt transcriptions.

Thus, in the course of the thirty years or more over which his activity
as composer extended, Liszt not only inaugurated new principles of
playing, but brought them to perfection himself, and illustrated them
in a thousand ways in his voluminous works; and, through the charm of
his personality and his pleasure in contact with young and promising
genius, became the master and the forming influence of all the concert
pianists who came upon the stage previous to his death.

No periods can be safely marked in the creative career of Liszt, at
least not in so far as relates to the pianoforte. In his "Studies for
Transcendent Execution," which appear to have been first written about
1836, advanced principles of playing are illustrate