In his _Spiritual Adventures_ Arthur Symons has a story of a musician who says more true things about the piano than I have ever found anywhere else. One of them is this: “Most modern music is a beggar for pity. The musician tries to show us how he has suffered and how hopeless he is. He sets his toothache and his heartache to music, putting those sufferings into the music without remembering that sounds have their own agonies which alone they can express in a perfect manner.” This is where the “lions and panthers of the piano” have failed most: they have not loved the sounds enough. They have not allowed each sound its full life. This is the real reason why the piano has stopped short of itself. They might almost as well have played bells. You can strike bells which will bring out any number of tunes, loud or soft, with every possible variety of phrasing. _But your interest will be in the tune rather than in the sound._ You can’t limit the piano to the tunes that can be played upon it. You don’t treat a violin that way, nor an organ. And of course you can register a piano almost as fully as an organ with the “stops” that are in the ends of your fingers. How fascinating it is, and how wonderful! But most piano recitals are like recitations—or some sort of performance on a school platform. Their beauty ends with the beauty of style, phrasing, finish, tone, taste. It is diction rather than music. It is science. Busoni is not a prophet; he is an orchestra. Hofmann loves style more than he does sound. Godowsky loves patterns more than sound. Gabrilowitsch loves delicate sounds intensely, but has no feeling for the sounds of great chords. Zeisler loves rhythm more than sound. And so on. Paderewski loves the piano. He is genius, pure and simple—though of course there is nothing less pure or simple. He may do what he likes—break sounds into bits, crack them like nuts. It doesn’t matter. He never fails to communicate a mood to the instrument—the mood of his personal equation. And that is art. “Przybyszewski playing Chopin”—that would also be art. What have the excellent piano concerts you hear to do with art, with inspiration? Piano playing is certainly something to be surpassed. Music is the thing! And that means ecstasy, madness, divinity,—the beauty upon which all the ends of the world are come. The design of sound.... Each sound that comes out of the piano is something alive.... * * * * * And now for the interesting part.