So your vast artistic endowment lies squandered, your ideas shallowly set, your science misused. For while fate showered you magnificently with gifts, it seems to have at the same time sought to negate its liberality by fusing in your personality the base alloy, by decreeing that you should have enormous powers and yet abuse them. It prevented you from often being completely genuine, completely incandescent, completely fine. It refused you for the greater part the true adamantine hardness of the artist, the inviolability of soul, the sense of style. It made you, the prodigiously fecund inventor, the mine of thematic material, prodigal; unable to refine your ore, to chase your ideas, and give them their full value. Wagner could have said of you, had he so wished, what Haendel is reported to have said of the composer from whom he borrowed, "Of what use is such a good idea to a man like him?" One must indeed go to Wagner for the appreciation of many of the inventions, the Siegmund and Sieglinde, the Parsifal and Kundry, music, which you cast from you so carelessly. As for yourself, you are too much the "virtuosic genius"; too much, at heart, the actor. Your music is perhaps the most cunningly carpentered for effect, the most artificial known to us. You are perhaps the most brilliant artifex of music. We always seem to see you sitting on the concert-platform before us, immersed in the expression of your passion, your disgust of passion, your renunciation of passion. But the absorption is not quite as complete as it would appear to be. During the entire performance, you have been secretly keeping one wicked little eye trained on the ladies of the audience. Sometimes you play the religious. Perhaps there truly was in you a vein of devotion and faith. The fact that you took Holy Orders to escape marrying the Princess of Sayn-Wittgenstein, who pursued you those many years and doubtlessly bored you with her theological writings, does not entirely disprove its existence. Indeed, your "Dante" symphony, with its Hell full of impenitent sexual offenders, its Purgatory full of those who repent them of their excesses, its Paradise represented by a hymn to the Virgin, suggests what manner of role, and how real a one, religion might have played in your luxurious existence. But, for the most part, the religiosity of your music recalls overmuch the fashionable confessor's. You bring consolation, doubtlessly. But you bring it by choice into the boudoir. You speak sadly of the cruel winds of lust. You dwell on the example of the pious St. Elizabeth of Hungary. You spread your hands over fair penitents, making a series of the most beautiful gestures. You whisper honeyed forgiveness for passional sins. You always excite tears and gratitude. But, in the end, your "Consolation" turns out only another "Liebestraum."