The piano has become an essential part of life. Those who cannot play it stand outside a great company which cultivates it as an engine of social and home intercourse. In households where there is no piano we seem to breathe a foreign atmosphere. To-day we need no longer explain the piano from the church or the theatre, from the ballet or the volkslied, from the artistic song or the violin; it has on the contrary become an active centre, which has given its form to our whole musical culture; nay, more, which has even given the stamp to our whole conception of music, not only in the minds of all amateurs, but in the minds of many professionals. Whether the young girl spends her time with Chopin’s E flat major Nocturne, or whether a false sentiment attaches itself to the “Maiden’s Prayer” or the “Cloister Bell”; whether the waltzes of Lanner delight a quiet mind or Strauss calls to the dance; whether the eager pupil plies her healthy sport in Cramer’s, Schmitt’s, or Czerny’s Studies, or the rising virtuoso exercises himself mechanically in scales after d’Albert’s fashion, while he simultaneously reads new notes, or as Henselt plays Bach while he reads his Bible; whether amateurs enjoy themselves with the piano-abstracts of operatic fragments; or whether artists like the Kapellmeisters Fischer and Sucher, offer those Fantasias from Wagner over which they have spent their lives; whether the professor allows himself the enjoyment of private piano-literature, or performs standard works before thousands in the concert hall;--all these are accidents of culture, they are phenomena which offer a picture of that intimate interdependence of music and actual life which has developed so fruitfully since the art ceased to be the private possession of a clique, and which has established it on an absolutely new foundation. Of course, the more general piano culture has become, the more has it been in turn used up as a profession, and the more easily were its wings fettered. Our chief men also have ceased to improvise during a recital. Only our “comic artists” do so at the present day. And of a power of magical improvisation, exercised in private such as Beethoven and Liszt so often displayed, we now hear less and less. The recitals, in great part, deal with the interpretation of known works, which often--like Beethoven’s E flat major concerto--are repeated _ad nauseam_. We have learning, we have playing, but we never see the enthusiasm which can be evoked by the stress of immediate creation. Piano-playing is a universal business even to the extremest limits of an amateurism which cannot strike a single chord instantaneously, nor dot a single note correctly. It is a long line from the little yawning schoolgirl, through the teacher running up and down stairs, to the virtuosos who play in the winter and give instruction in the summer. With excess of zeal comes sin. Nowhere in an art is a sin