ing."

In all these respects, Schubert was epoch-making; and if the beautiful
details he suggested to his successors up to the present day could be
taken out of their works there would be some surprising blanks.
Especially also is this true in the realm of lyric song, for, as
everybody knows, he practically created the art song as we know and love
it. The greatest of his immediate successors, Schumann and Franz,
cheerfully admitted that they could never have written such songs as
they gave the world but for Schubert, and the same confession might be
made by the latest of the great songwriters, Grieg, Richard Strauss, and
our American MacDowell. Schubert's best songs have never been equalled.
They belong in the realm of modern music quite as much as Wagner's
music-dramas and Liszt's symphonic poems.

Chopin is another composer who, although he died in 1849 (Schubert died
in 1828), is as modern as the masters just named. He was as boldly
original as Schubert, and as great a magician in the art of arousing
deep emotion by means of novel, unexpected modulations. As an originator
of new harmonic progressions he has had only three equals,--Bach,
Schubert, and Wagner. Harmonies as ultra-modern as those of Wagner's
"Parsifal" may be found in some of the mazurkas of Chopin. He was, as
Rubinstein called him, "the soul of the pianoforte." No one before or
after him knew how to make that instrument speak so eloquently. By
ingeniously scattering the notes of a chord over the keyboard while
holding down the pedal, he practically gave the player three or four
hands, and greatly enlarged the harmonic and coloristic possibilities of
the pianoforte. Liszt, Rubinstein, Paderewski, and others have gone
farther still in the same direction, but he showed the way, and most of
his pieces are as delightful and as modern now as they were on the day
when they were written. He wrote a few sonatas, but the majority of his
works are short pieces such as are characteristic of the modern
romantic school.

Before Chopin modernized pianoforte music the world's greatest composers
had been Italians, Germans, and Frenchmen. Chopin's father was a
Frenchman, but his mother was a native of Poland, and he was born in
that country. While his music has the French qualities of elegance and
clearness (which every one admires in the works of Gounod, Bizet,
Massenet, and other Parisian masters), in its essence it is Polish--a
fact of special significance, for fro