Most of the music of Herz and Thalberg has been forgotten, and that which might still be successfully played, is now banished from the concert stage as trash. It is true not only that one finds a great sameness in it, but also that in the light of a longer familiarity with the instrument and of strides in executive skill on the keyboard little of it presents what may seem to us today even ingenuity. Yet to estimate its value as well as its significance in the world of pianoforte music one must not forget the purpose for which it was written; namely, to display the composer’s skill as a performer, and the brilliant and powerful resources of the instrument, and at the same time to win a livelihood from the world by stirring its inhabitants to a frenzied delight. The aim to succeed with the public, no matter what the means, has something of the heroic in it, and in music which has been the means of such success there must be some element of bigness. This bears no relation to the greatness of service to an ideal which is sacred. It is in every way profane. Yet it is at the same time a force always to be reckoned with, the more so as the development of society gives the power to the mass of people to assert its own tastes and demand its own enjoyments. To such a development the universal success of Herz and Thalberg is related. It is because of still further development that their wonders have become commonplaces, not because either their purpose or their music is intrinsically contemptible. Both these are respectable as manifestations of energy and great labor; and that the two great players achieved a victory which won the applause of the whole world, indicates a streak of the hero in the cosmos of both. III We may conceive Herz and Thalberg each to be an infant Hercules, strangling serpents in his cradle, if we compare them with Franz Liszt, who, above all else, represents virtuosity grown to fully heroic proportions. He was the great and universal hero in the history of music. He cannot be dissociated from the public, the general world over which he established his supremacy by feats of sheer muscular or technical skill. Even the activity of his mind was essentially empirical. Especially in the realm of pianoforte music he won his unique place by colossal energy put to test or to experiment upon the public through the instrument. The majority of his compositions in this branch of music are _tours de force_.