The progress in piano playing, in the course of the nineteenth century has been most extraordinary. The music of Beethoven and Schubert, composed during the first quarter of this century, and the influence of the virtuosi prominent during that time, whose activity has been told in connection with those of the century previous (the operative principles of which were the ones mainly influencing them); and the continual strife of the piano makers to increase the resonance, singing quality and artistic susceptibility of the tone and the strength and elasticity of the action, as recounted in the chapter devoted to the history of this, the greatest of modern instruments--were concentrating influences having the effect of calling attention to the new instrument in a very remarkable manner. Add to these causes the meteor-like appearance of Paganini, with his stupendous execution upon the violin, and its novel possibilities. All these together seem to have led four gifted geniuses at about the same time to make independent investigations into the tonal possibilities of the piano, and the mode of producing effects upon it, in the hope of creating a new art, and of rivaling the weird successes of the highly gifted Italian, who apparently had exhausted the possibilities of the violin. The artists thus occupied in developing the art of piano playing were Chopin, Liszt, Thalberg and Schumann, and it is far from easy to determine exactly which one it was who first brought his influence to bear upon the public; or which one it was who first arrived at the successful application of the principles of the new technique, whose essential divergences from the old consisted in a more flexible use of the fingers, hand and arm, and the co-operation of the foot for the promotion of blending, and of bringing into simultaneous use the tonal resources from all parts of the instrument. In this case, as in so many others of remarkable invention, the improvements seem to have been made by several independent investigators acting simultaneously, each one ignorant of the work of the others. The impulse in the direction of greater freedom had already found expression in the pianoforte pieces of the great master, Von Weber, whose sonatas and caprices had been published between 1810 and 1820. (See pp. 410 and 411.) These contain several novelties, which I have found it more convenient to discuss in connection with the personal history of the composer. Liszt has generally been held as a little the earliest of the four in point of time, his arrangement of Berlioz's "Harold" symphony having been published, according to the dates in Weitzmann's history, in 1827, but according to more accurate information, in 1835, while he had published his arrangement of the Paganini caprices in 1832, one year after hearing Paganini. In these works Liszt makes demands upon the hands which were not recognized as among the possibilities of the old technique. But for all this, it is