an whose life is lived on
the concert-platform, whose values are those of the concert-room, who
finds his highest good in the instantaneous effect achieved by his
performance. From childhood you were the idolized piano-virtuoso. All
your days you were smothered in the adulation showered upon you in very
tangible form by the great ladies of every capital of Europe. And a
virtuoso you remained all your existence. You never developed out of
that early situation into something more salutary to the artist. On the
contrary, you came to require the atmosphere of the performance, the
exhibition, about you continually, to find the rose leaves and the
clouds of perfume absolutely necessary. Most of your composition seems
but the effort to perpetuate about you the admiration and the adulation,
the glowing eyes and half-parted lips and heaving bosoms. Everything in
your piano-music is keyed for that effect. The shameless
sentimentalities, the voluptuous lingerings over sweet chords and
incisive notes, the ostentatious recitatives, the moist, sensual
climaxes, the titillating figuration, the over-draperies, were called
into existence for the immediate, the overwhelming effect at first
hearing. Everything is broadened and peppered and directed to obtaining
you the Pasha-power you craved. Besides being windy and theatrical, your
music is what Nietzsche so bitterly called it, "Die Schule der
Gelaeufichkeit--nach Frauen."

So your vast artistic endowment lies squandered, your ideas shallowly
set, your science misused. For while fate showered you magnificently
with gifts, it seems to have at the same time sought to negate its
liberality by fusing in your personality the base alloy, by decreeing
that you should have enormous powers and yet abuse them. It prevented
you from often being completely genuine, completely incandescent,
completely fine. It refused you for the greater part the true adamantine
hardness of the artist, the inviolability of soul, the sense of style.
It made you, the prodigiously fecund inventor, the mine of thematic
material, prodigal; unable to refine your ore, to chase your ideas, and
give them their full value. Wagner could have said of you, had he so
wished, what Haendel is reported to have said of the composer from whom
he borrowed, "Of what use is such a good idea to a man like him?" One
must indeed go to Wagner for the appreciation of many of the inventions,
the Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Parsifal and Kundry,