But it would be a mistake to suppose that Herz’s elaborate fantasias and variations lack cleverness and a very genuine brilliance. An examination of many of them will prove to one even at this day, when all are nearly or quite forgotten, that Herz knew his piano astonishingly well. Let us look for a moment at the _Variations brillantes_, opus 105, on a favorite motive from Bellini’s _Sonnambula_. There is first an introduction. This is withal desperately commonplace. It suggests posturings, meaningless formalities, a whole technique of specious oratory. Yet it is a technique. The weakness in such music is that it is ready-made. There is no originality in it, nor any vitality. The eye discerns the stock figures of the virtuoso laid one after the other across the page. First, there are three measures of the chromatic scale, each measure running through the octave, so that the second repeats the first, and the third the second, with only the change of register. Moreover, each measure is phrased by itself, and at the beginning of each there is placed a mark of emphasis; so that there is not even an effect of rushing or roaring from bottom to top, but only one of movement from one point to another, like the leaping of the frog up the steep sides of the well of our algebra problems. The final leap to the pinnacle of high F, is worthy of the mountain goat. This figure jumps its stages across our ears and out of sound. Then follows a welling up of emotion. The orator condescends. He is affably sentimental, will take us into his confidence, not without dignity, however. Listen to the strains of this immortal melody! Here a heart sings. What if it were Bellini’s heart, we now add upon our instrument a long tremulous sigh of our own. Once more the opening phrases. Here again the directions read, _capriccioso_; and again the goat leaps up the scale from low F to high. But here follows a passage of trills, long trills on F, on G, on A, on B-flat, and so on, up and up to the highest of all F’s on the keyboard; while the left hand surges and falls back in broken chords of changing harmonies. Nothing could be more brilliantly effective. The concluding measures of the introduction play with long, light scales over a phrase or two of melody; and a long-drawn half-cadence, and a fermata, announce at last that the piece is about to begin.