Schumann its artistic treatment. With his Impromptus and Moments Musicals, those small impressionist forms, Schubert placed piano-literature upon a new basis. Here is found that form of chamber music which is most peculiar to the piano as a solo instrument with full harmony. It is not a sonata, which is founded by the great laws of universal tonic art; nor a concerto, which drags the piano before a many-headed multitude which delights in distraction; nor an operatic fantasia or variation on an air, which forbids the charm of free improvisation; no technical elaborated étude, nor a scientifically constructed fugato;--but a piece which brings single selected musical thoughts into a short artistic form, no longer in extent than the tone-colour of the instrument permits; yet, with all infelt genuineness, informed with the best effects of the piano, which the player, as he composes in solitude, feels in full intensity. Almost all Schubert’s pieces retain something of the spirit of the time. Some are a kind of variations; others études, a third class dances; but they are constantly more than mere echoes of the time; they are founded on an inner genuineness, and much too full in expression to permit of being included under any category of the external. In Beethoven’s life we witnessed the way in which a world-embracing genius gradually threw off the traditional form; in Schubert we see how an intimate spirit gradually rises above the style of the time. This development is included between the Sonatas and the Wanderer Fantasia on the one hand, and the Moments Musicals on the other. At the same period in which the technical musicians accomplished the outward emancipation of the clavier, these short pieces (Kurze Geschichten) made it inwardly free. [Illustration: Lithograph of 1846, by J. Kriehuber (1801-1876).] As Impromptus the two groups, Op. 90 and Op. 142, were published. Those of the first group have all penetrated deeply into our musical consciousness. All roads lead us back again to the first Impromptu with its simple popular melody in two sections, which is varied in so many extraordinary ways; and with that melodious middle-movement, more joyous and ethereal, than any that had ever been heard before on the pianoforte. Who can forget the second with the light étude-like triplet-swinging in E flat major and the mighty B minor middle section; or the third with its wonderful G flat major melody, its divine modulations and its captivatingly simple conclusion, revealing unexpected melodic wonders in a broken chord of the seventh; or the fourth, a light floating figure with its short Volkslied intermezzi and the long drawn out melody of the trio in C♯ minor--Schumann all over!