There seems to be no end of the discussion which has raged over the relative merits of so-called program music and absolute music. It has little relation to the beauty of sound in both kinds; else the triumphant beauty of much program music would have long since put an end to it. The Liszt Legends are as delightful to the ear as any other of his pieces which have no relation to external things. What we have to observe is that they deal with effects, that is with masses of sound--trills, scales and other cumulative figures; that, finely as these may be wrought, they have no beauty of detail nor any detailed significance. Here is no trace of that art of music which Chopin practised, an art of weaving many strands of sound in such a way that every minute twist of them had a special beauty, a music in which every note had an individual and a relative significance. The texture of the ‘Legends’ is perhaps brilliantly colored, but it is solid or even coarse in substance, relatively unvaried, and only generally significant. But it serves its purpose admirably. In the _Années de pèlerinage_ one finds a great deal of Liszt in a nut-shell. The three years of wandering through Switzerland and Italy netted twenty-three relatively short pieces, to which were later added three more, of Venetian and Neapolitan coloring, a _gondoliera_, a _canzona_, and a _tarantella_. All these pieces bear titles which are of greater or lesser importance to the music itself. It must be admitted that only a title may explain such poor music as _Orage_, _Vallée d’Obermann_ and _Marche funèbre_ (in memory of Emperor Maximilian of Mexico). These pieces are inexcusable bombast. The _Vallée d’Obermann_, which may claim to be the most respectable of them, is not only dank, saturated with sentimentality, but lacks spontaneous harmony and melody, and toward the end becomes a mountain of commonplace noise to which one can find a parallel only in such songs as ‘Palm Branches’ (_Les Rameaux_). The ‘Chapel of William Tell,’ the ‘Fantasia written after a reading of Dante,’ the three pieces which claim a relation to three sonnets of Petrarch, and the two _Aux cyprès de la villa d’Este_, are hardly better. There is an _Éclogue_, a piece on homesickness, one on the Bells of Geneva, an ‘Angelus’ and a _Sursum Corda_ as well. Three, however, that deal with water in which there is no trace of tears--_Au lac du Wallenstedt_, _Au bord d’une source_, and _Les jeux d’eaux à la Villa d’Este_--are wholly pleasing and even delightful pianoforte music. Especially the second of these is a valuable addition to the literature of the instrument. The suggested melody is spontaneous, the harmonies richly though not subtly colored, the scoring exquisite.