d as fully as any
that meet us later; and in the first of his serious transcriptions of
orchestral works for piano,--the "Fantastic Symphony" of Berlioz,--he
set himself as carefully to reproduce upon the piano the orchestral
work as he did in his famous transcriptions of the Beethoven symphonies
and the later things of Wagner. But, while creative periods can not be
affirmed with certainty, there are differences of style. In some of
his works he indulges in a variety of piano-playing additions having no
essential, or indeed suitable, relation to the musical matter which he
purports to be illustrating. In others, on the contrary, he is
essentially simple, loyal, and scrupulous to the last degree. The
latter is true of his transcriptions of some of the Schubert songs,
especially such as "My Sweet Repose," "The Wanderer," "Hark! Hark! the
Lark," "The Erl King," "The Ave Maria," "Greeting to Spring," etc. In
many of his operatic fantasies, on the contrary, he puts in running
work, effect-cadenzas, and interpolations of various sorts. This is
illustrated, perhaps better than elsewhere, in his enormously difficult
fantasia upon melodies from Bellini's "Sonnambula," which for several
years was one of his own concert pieces. In this there is a very
difficult part where two melodies are going together, and a long and
difficult trill. Other examples of this kind of writing are found in
his "Trovatore" fantasias, his "Rigoletto," and the like.

After the production of "Lohengrin," Liszt seems to have entered upon a
more serious view of his art than he had previously held, and his works
later are generally more confined to musical considerations, and free
from display as such. Nevertheless, the "Rigoletto" fantasia can not
have been written prior to 1851, for it was in this year that the opera
was first produced.

In cataloguing the Liszt works according to the difficulty they present
to the piano player, it must first be noted that such has been the
advance during the fifty years since the early ones were produced, that
compositions which at their first appearance seemed stupendous to
ordinary pianists have now, thanks to education and the general advance
of art, become practicable to players of little beyond ordinary
capacity. In fact, there is a whole world of pieces by Liszt which are
more practicable to young players than most of the serious compositions
of Chopin. The latter composer demands, above everything els