In his huge Piano School a combination in Hummel of the old master and the modern player is very visible. He systematises fingering into the following divisions: (1) advancing with simple finger-order in easy figure-successions; (2) passing the thumb under other fingers or other fingers over the thumb; (3) leaving out one or more fingers; (4) changing a finger with another on the same key; (5) stretches and leaps; (6) thumb and fourth finger on the black notes; (7) the passing of a long finger over a shorter, or of a short under a long; (8) change of different fingers on a key, with repeated or not repeated touch, and often the repeated use of the same finger on several keys; (9) alternation, interweaving, or crossing of the hands; and, finally (10), the legato style. A stupendous work indeed; and for every head of the fingering, for every technical possibility, a number of examples are introduced, with the completest calculation of permutations ever seen. There are in all two thousand two hundred examples, and more than a hundred exercises develop the possibilities of playing between C and G. Before every exercise stand the harmonic ground-chords. And thus comes to pass the great miracle, that by means of the utmost conceivable combinations, by means of the hundred chromatic subtleties, musical figures are formed which no composer had previously invented, and which lead on to sound-effects never before suspected. In the examples of an exercise-book lay undreamed-of novelties in piano-composition. Hummel himself had a very modest opinion of his own compositions. He knew that he had made no advance in the path of Beethoven; and that no greatness was possible outside of it. “It was a serious moment for me,” he said once at Weimar to Ferdinand Hiller, “when Beethoven appeared. Was I to try to follow in the footsteps of such a genius? For a while I did not know what I stood on; but finally I said to myself that it was best to remain true to myself and my own nature.” With this determination Hummel founded the new, rich school of piano-playing, delighting in sound, and revelling in execution, in which even seriousness and passion are expressed with pomp and circumstance. Brilliancy has expelled grace, and the pompous the lightness of the dance.