It may be that these transcriptions served a good end by making at least the names and the melodies of a number of immortal songs familiar to the public, but there can be no doubt that these masterpieces have proved more acceptable in their original form. Most of Liszt’s transcriptions have fallen from the public stage. Amateurs who have the skill to play them have the knowledge that, for all their cleverness, they are not the songs themselves. And those which have been kept alive owe their present state of being to the favor of the pianist, who conceives them to be only pieces for his own instrument. The number of Liszt’s transcriptions in the style of fantasias is very great. Like his predecessors and his contemporaries he made use of any and every tune, and the airs or scenes from most of the favorite operas. There are fantasias on ‘God Save the King’ and _Le Carnaval de Venise_, on _Rigoletto_, _Trovatore_, and _Don Giovanni_. The name of the rest is legion. The frequency with which a few of them are still heard, would seem to prove that they at least have some virtue above those compositions of Herz and Thalberg in a similar vein; but most of them are essentially neither a better nor a worthier addition to the literature of the instrument and have been discarded from it. Those who admire Liszt unqualifiedly have said of these fantasias that they are great in having reproduced the spirit of the original works on which they were founded, that Liszt not only took a certain melody upon which to work, but that he so worked upon it as to intensify the original meaning which it took from its setting in the opera. The _Don Giovanni_ fantasia is considered a masterpiece in thus expanding and intensifying at once. But what, after all, is this long fantasia but a show piece of the showiest and the emptiest kind? How is it more respectable than Thalberg’s fantasia on themes from ‘Moses,’ except that it contains fifty times as many notes and is perhaps fifty times louder and faster? It is a grand, a superb _tour de force_; but the pianist who plays it--and he must wield the power of the elements--reveals only what he can do, and what Liszt could do. It can be only sensational. There is no true fineness in it. It is massive, almost orchestral. The only originality there is in it is in making a cyclone roar from the strings, or thunder rumble in the distance and crash overhead. On the whole the meretricious fantasia on _Rigoletto_ is more admirable, because it is more naïve and less pretentious.