ozart's sonatas are sublime;
that they far transcend anything written for the harpsichord or
clavichord by Haydn or his contemporaries, we are apt to echo the
saying ... But let us look the thing straight in the face: Mozart's
sonatas 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