Liszt, the supreme virtuoso of the piano, is the Liszt who wrote about three-fourths of the compositions which bear his name. The other fourth, or perhaps a quarter share of the whole, comes from another Liszt, a great poet, who could feel the values of whole nations as Chopin could feel the values of individual souls. It is not a paradox to say that Liszt was so utterly master of the piano that he was a slave to it. With it he won a place for himself among counts and princesses, storming a national capital with twenty-four concerts at a single visit by way of variety between flirtations. Having so deeply in his being the pianistic formulas for conquering, it was inevitable that when he set out to do other tasks the pianistic formula conquered him. So it is, at least, in much of his music, which, with all its supreme pianistic skill, is sometimes pretty worthless music. Only, apart from this Liszt of the piano, there always stood that other Liszt--the one who, as he tells us in his book on gypsy music, slept in the open fields with the gypsies, studied and noted their tunes, and felt the great sweeps of nature as strongly as he felt the great sweeps of history. Both Liszts must be kept in mind if we would understand his piano works. Liszt’s piano style was quite the opposite of Chopin’s. The Pole played for a few intimate friends; the Hungarian played for a vast auditorium. He had the sense of the crowd as few others have ever had it. His dazzling sweeps of arpeggios, of diatonic and chromatic runs, his thunderous chords, piling up on one another and repeated in violent succession, his unbelievable rapidity of finger movement, his way of having the whole seven octaves of the keyboard apparently under his fingers at once--in short, his way of making the pianoforte seem to be a whole orchestra--this was the Liszt who wrote the greater part of what we are about to summarize briefly.