and Schumann, are of greater importance than
Chopin's. So far am I from sharing this opinion that if I had to
choose between never again hearing a pianoforte piece by any or all of
those composers, or never again hearing a Chopin composition, I should
decide in favor of Chopin. Some years ago I expressed my conviction,
in _The Nation_, that Chopin is as distinctly superior to all other
piano composers as Wagner is to all other opera composers. A
distinguished Cincinnati musician, Mr. Otto Singer, was horrified at
this statement, and wrote in _The Courier_, of that city, that it
could only have been made by "a patriotically inclined Frenchman or a
consumptive inhabitant of Poland;" adding that "he would readily yield
up possession of quite a number of Chopin's bric-a-brac for Schumann's
single 'Warum.'" I am neither a patriotic Frenchman nor a consumptive
Pole, and I am a most ardent admirer of Schumann; nevertheless I
uphold my former opinion, and my chief object in this essay is to
endeavor to justify it.

All authorities, in the first place, admit that Chopin created an
entirely new style of playing the pianoforte. Many have pointed out
the peculiarities of this style--the use of extended and scattered
chords, the innovations in fingering which facilitate _legato_
playing, the spray of dainty little ornamental notes, the use of the
capricious _tempo rubato_, and so on. But it has not been made
sufficiently clear by any writer how it was that Chopin became the
Wagner of the pianoforte, so to speak, by revealing for the first time
the infinite possibilities of varied and beautiful tone-colors
inherent in that instrument. To understand this point fully, it is
necessary to bear in mind a few facts regarding the history of the
pianoforte.

The name of pianoforte was given about a century and a half ago to an
instrument constructed by the Italian Cristofori, who devised a
mechanism for striking the strings with hammers. In the older
instruments--the clarichords and harpsichords--the strings were either
snapped by means of crow's quills, or pushed with a tangent. The new
hammer action not only brought a better tone out of the string, but
enabled the pianist to play any note loud or soft at pleasure; hence
the name _piano-forte_. But the pianoforte itself required many years
before all its possibilities of tone-production were discovered. The
instruments used by Mozart still had a thin short tone, and there was
no pedal f