flashy harpsichord
virtuosity such as Liszt never descended to, even in those of
his works at which so many persons are accustomed to sneer.

Such a statement as I have just made may be cried down as
rank heresy, first by the book readers and then by the general
public; but I doubt if anyone among that public would or could
actually turn to the music itself and analyze it intelligently,
from both an aesthetic and technical standpoint, in order to
verify or disprove the assertion.

Once a statement is made it seems to be exceedingly difficult
to keep it from obtaining the universal acceptance which it
gains by unthinking reiteration in other works. One of the
strangest cases of this repetition of a careless statement may
be found in the majority of histories of music, where we are
told that musical expression (that is to say, the increasing
and diminishing of a tone, crescendo and diminuendo) was
first _discovered_ at Mannheim, in Germany, about 1760. This
statement may be found in the works of Burney, Schubart,
Reichardt, Sittard, Wasielewski, and even in Jahn's celebrated
"Life of Mozart." The story is that Jommelli, an Italian,
first "invented" the crescendo and diminuendo, and that when
they were first used, the people in the audience gradually
rose from their seats at the crescendo, and as the music
"diminuendoed" they sat down again. The story is absurd,
for the simple reason that even in 1705, Sperling, in his
"Principae Musicae," describes crescendos from _ppp_ to _fff_,
and we read in Plutarch of the same thing.

Shedlock, in his work "The Pianoforte Sonata," quotes as the
first sonatas for the clavier those of Kuhnau, and cites
especially the six _Bible_ sonatas. Now Kuhnau, although
he was Bach's predecessor at St. Thomas' Church in Leipzig,
was certainly a composer of the very lowest rank. The _Bible_
sonatas, which Shedlock paints to us in such glowing colours,
are the merest trash, and not to be compared with the works of
his contemporaries. I do not think that they have any place
whatsoever in the history or development either of music or
of that form called the sonata.

The development of the suite from dance forms has already
been shown, and we will now trace the development of the
sonata from the suite in Italy, Germany, and France. As an
example of this development in Italy, a so-called sonata by
G.B. Pescetti will serve (the sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti
were not originally so named, and the