It seems to have been above all else the fire in Liszt’s playing which made it what it was, a fire which showed itself in great flames of sound, spreading with incredible rapidity up and down the keyboard, which, like lightning, was followed by a prodigious thunder. Yet it was a playing which might rival all the elements, furious winds, tumultuous waters, very phenomena of sounds. Caricatures show him in all sorts of amazing attitudes, and many draw him with more than two hands, or more than five fingers to a hand. At the piano he was like Jupiter with the thunder-bolts, Æolus with the winds of heaven, Neptune with the oceans of the earth in his control. And at the piano he made his way to the throne which perhaps no other will ever occupy again. Just what was the effect of Liszt’s accomplishments upon pianoforte technique must be carefully considered, and such a consideration will bring us to problems which we may venture to assert are of profound interest to the pianist and to the musician. Broadly speaking he expanded the range of technique enormously, which is to say that he discovered many new effects and developed others which had previously been but partially understood. The _Douze Études d’exécution transcendante_ may be taken to constitute a registry of his technical innovations. First, in these, and in all his music, he makes a free and almost constant use of all the registers of the keyboard, the very low and the very high more than they had been used before, and the middle with somewhat more powerful scoring than was usual with any other composers excepting Schumann. Particularly his use of the low registers spread through the piano an orchestral thunder. The ceaseless and rapid weaving together of the deepest and the highest notes made necessary a wide, free movement of both arms, and more remarkably of the left arm, because such rapid flights had hardly been demanded of it before. The fourth étude, a musical reproduction of the ride of Mazeppa, is almost entirely a study in the movement of the arms, demanding of them, especially in the playing of the inner accompaniment, an activity and control hardly less rapid or less accurate than what a great part of pianoforte music had demanded of the fingers.