are compositions entirely unworthy of the author of ’The Magic Flute’ and ‘Don Giovanni,’ or of any composer with pretensions to more than mediocre talent.  They are written in a style of flashy harpsichord virtuosity such as Liszt in his most despised moments never descended to.  Yet I am well aware that this statement would be dismissed as either absurd or heretical, according to the point of view of the particular objector.”

Of Mendelssohn he said:  “Mendelssohn professed to be an ‘absolutist’ in music.  As a matter of fact, he stands on the same ground that Liszt and Berlioz did; for almost everything he wrote, even to the smallest piano piece, he furnished with an explanatory title....  Formalist though he was, his work often exhibits eccentricities of form—­as, for instance, in the Scotch Symphony, where, in the so-called ‘exposition’ of the first movement, he throws in an extra little theme that laps over his frame with a jaunty disregard of the rules that is delightful....  His technic of piano writing was perfect; compared with Beethoven’s it was a revelation.  He never committed the fault of mere virtuoso writing, which is remarkable when we consider how strong a temptation there must have been to do so.  In his piano music can be found the germs of most of the pianistic innovations that are usually identified with other composers—­for instance, the manner of enveloping the melody with runs, the discovery of which has been ascribed to Thalberg, but which we find in Mendelssohn’s first Prelude, written in 1833.  The interlocking passages which have become so prevalent in modern music we find in his compositions dating from 1835.”

Of Schumann he said happily:  “His music is not avowed programme-music; neither is it, as was much of Schubert’s, pure delight in beautiful sound.  It did not break through formalism by sheer violence of emotion, as did Beethoven’s:  it represents the rhapsodical revery of an inspired poet to whom no imaginative vagary seems strange or alien, and who has the faculty of relating his visions, never attempting to give them coherence, and unaware of their character until perhaps when, awakened from his dream, he naively wonders what they may have meant—­you remember that he added titles to his music after it was composed.  He put his dreams in music and guessed their meaning afterward.”

Of Liszt and Chopin:  “To all of this new, strange music [the piano music of the Romantics] Liszt and Chopin added the wonderful tracery of Orientalism.  The difference between these two is, that with Chopin this tracery developed poetic thought as with a thin gauze; whereas with Liszt [in his piano music] the embellishment itself made the starting-point for almost a new art in tonal combination, the effects of which one sees on every hand to-day.  To realise its influence one need only compare the easy mastery of the arabesque displayed in the simplest piano piece of to-day with the awkward and gargoyle-like figuration of Beethoven and his predecessors.  We may justly attribute this to Liszt rather than to Chopin, whose nocturne embellishments are but first cousins to those of the Englishman, John Field.”