erest to a remarkable degree. Harmonically considered, almost
all his works are within rather narrow limits, but as compared with the
French composers of the day when his works made so much furor in Paris,
Gottschalk has nothing to apologize for, since his music has a charm
and a distinction of originality superior to almost all of that time or
the present.

Many of the things with which Gottschalk made a great effect in his
concert tours would not have been composed if he had lived thirty or
forty years later. I mean now his four-hand arrangements of the
overtures to "William Tell" and "Oberon." These are extremely
brilliant and sensational arrangements, and are well worthy the
attention of boarding-schools and clubs desiring something out of the
ordinary way. It was his custom, in his concerts, to play the upper
part himself while the best available local performer played the other
part. This gave most of the melody and all of the brilliant work to
the masterly fingers of the pianist himself.

The poetic thread or suggestion underlying many of his pieces is very
slight. Nevertheless, it is not without value. Take, for instance,
the beautiful "Marche de Nuit," a piece which opens with six lines of
introduction, amounting practically to an excellent study of crescendo,
the idea being to show the effect of the march-music in the extreme
distance and its gradual approach. At length we come to the march
itself, and it is a pleasant and agreeable melody, and the difficulty
of the whole is no more than is now well within the powers of a pupil
in the early fifth grade. The famous "Last Hope" is well known to all,
and is one of the most persistent melodies which any American composer
has produced in instrumental music. The introduction and the coda are
both much too long, and can only be saved by a certain distinction in
the manner of performing them. Mr. Wolfsohn said that such was the
charm of Gottschalk's personality and touch that everything he played
impressed itself and you remembered it a very long time. Dr. Mason
tells me that in these pianissimo runs in _alt_, which abound in so
many of his works, Gottschalk's fingers were like little steel hammers,
the tone being perfectly clear and like a bell, but not pianissimo in
the true sense of the term.

It seems puerile now that in his concerts Gottschalk could have made an
effect with his famous piece "The Banjo," which is a very realistic
transcription of a