There are motives whose interest lies in the size of the hand; or in the playing of a legato passage simultaneously with the chords in the same hand;[125] or again, contrary motion of chords in both hands has to be carried out; or, yet further, attention is paid to an easy gliding of the hand over great stretches; or finger-changing on the same key is the ground-idea. The piece may aim at _cantabile_ or at the perfect legato in a _fugato_ movement, or at the practice of octaves, pearl-like scales, pianissimo touch, the freedom of the left hand, a double melody, or any of the hundred technical possibilities. There are dry and insipid methods of thus working out academically a technical idea; but it is also possible to see in delicate and ingenious ways, slumbering germs of great fruitfulness in the technical motive, and to develop powers of unexpected beauty. The one way sees in a broken chord only the means of using it in major or minor modes, or in the seventh, or in some unusual successions, first for the right hand, then for the left, then for both, and perhaps finally with sustained notes. Theory is satisfied, a practical object provided, the academic conscience laid to rest. But the other way sees in the broken chords their elementary character, the germ of the Rheingold or of the Götterdämmerung. It permits them first to sound slightly, then to grow further and further, to assume a daemonic grandeur; like eternal signs, to stretch over the heavens and embrace the worlds. Thus, no less than the other, it presents all the _nuances_ of major, minor, seventh, right, left, up and down; but it covers these technical variations so perfectly with the sense of the inner meaning that they become identified, and can never be separated: the technical and the characteristic content have, in the mind of a genius like this, involuntarily become a unity. Such a master, for example, takes the neat finger-changing on one note as the means for a rococo-sketch, the pianissimo leaps for a dance of the elves, the rolling passages in the left hand for the roar of the sea with elemental upper parts; the rhythmical varieties in left and right for graceful fetters of the dance; the scurrying glide over the black keys for a picture of homely pleasures. Here reveals itself the entire fruitfulness of the technical setting, which--who could believe it?--precisely by the limitation of the motive, approaches very near to characteristic art and realism of presentation. Here is a rich field opened to technical subjectivity. Personality is very variously displayed in the setting of a technical idea. Contrast with Clementi, who scarcely ever shows any specific sense of character in a motive, such a man as Hummel, who on theoretic grounds calculates out the utmost technical possibilities of a motive; or Czerny, who in a practical manner attains the same many-sidedness; or Cramer, who was