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The most empty of your many ostentatious orchestral soliloquies, the most feeble of your many piano-pyrotechnics, the iciest of your bouquets of icy, exploding stars, the brassiest of your blatant perorations, the very falsest of your innumerable paste jewels, declare that you were born to sit among the great ones of your craft. For they reveal you the indubitable virtuosic genius.
In fact, I shall confine myself to saying that in Chopin's works there are clearly distinguishable two styles the early virtuosic and the later poetic style. The latter is in a certain sense also virtuosic, but with this difference, that its virtuosity is not virtuosity for virtuosity's sake.
In it Chopin is discovered posturing, dealing in phrases, and coquetting with sentimental affectations. In short, the composer comes before us as a man of the world, intent on pleasing, and sure of himself and success. The general airiness of the style is a particularly-noticeable feature of this piece of Chopin's virtuosic period.
As for yourself, you are too much the "virtuosic genius"; too much, at heart, the actor. Your music is perhaps the most cunningly carpentered for effect, the most artificial known to us. You are perhaps the most brilliant artifex of music.
Though as the foreigner he perceived only the superficial and picturesque elements of the life of the land its Orientalism, its barbaric coloring and found his happiest expression in a fantasy after the "Thousand Nights and a Night," he noted his impressions skilfully and vividly, with an almost virtuosic sense of his material.
And even "Mazeppa," in which Liszt's virtuosic genius stood him in good stead, makes one feel as though Liszt could never quite keep his eye on the fact, and finally became engrossed in the weaving of a musical pattern fairly extraneous to his idea. The "Faust Symphony" is, after all, an exception. Berlioz, too, failed on the whole to achieve the musical novel.
He sought in his piano compositions to recapture the lofty, spiritual tone, the religious communion that informed the works of Bach. Only once, in the "Variations Symphoniques," is he brilliant and virtuosic, and then, with what disarming naïveté and joyousness! Oftentimes it is the gray and lonely air of the organ-loft at St.
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