surprises, all were
delicately calculated and the weaver of these bewildered dreams seemed
to watch over them like a Loge of celestial ingenuity.

When the actual Liszt came, the interminable Sonata in B minor, in which
the sugar and the fire are so strangely mixed, it was as if Paderewski
were still playing his own music. If ever there was a show piece for
the piano, this was it, and if ever there was a divine showman for it,
it was Paderewski. You felt at once the personal sympathy of the great
pianist for the great pianist. He was no longer reverential, as with
Beethoven, not doing homage but taking part, sharing almost in a
creation, comet-like, of stars in the sky. Nothing in the bravura
disconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or obviousness
in contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous, explosive, he
tossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in what was
luscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real worth
by the delighted skill with which he set them singing. A more
astonishing, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force could
hardly be achieved on the piano: could an eruption of Vesuvius be more
spectacularly magnificent?

Liszt's music for the piano was written for a pianist who could do
anything that has ever been done with the instrument, and the result is
not so wholly satisfactory as in the ease of Chopin, who, with a
smaller technique, knew more of the secret of music. Chopin never
dazzles, Liszt blinds. It is a question if he ever did full justice to
his own genius, which was partly that of an innovator, and people are
only now beginning to do justice to what was original as well as fine in
his work. How many ideas Wagner caught from him, in his shameless
transfiguring triumphant way! The melody of the Flower-Maidens, for
instance, in "Parsifal," is borrowed frankly from a tone-poem of Liszt
in which it is no more than a thin, rocking melody, without any of the
mysterious fascination that Wagner put into it. But in writing for the
piano Liszt certainly remembered that it was he, and not some unknown
person, who was to play these hard and showy rhapsodies, in which there
are no depths, though there are splendours. That is why Liszt is the
test rather of the virtuoso than of the interpreter, why, therefore, it
was so infinitely more important that Paderewski should have played the
Beethoven sonata as impersonally as he did than that he