made illustrious for several years, there beginning the second division of his life (see sec. 210).
Liszt's piano works—only partly belonging to the period before 1850—include (a) a long list of transcriptions and arrangements from the most varied sources, as from Bach's organ-fugues, Beethoven's symphonies, overtures and other orchestral works by Weber, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Rossini, Berlioz, Wagner, Raff, Glinka, etc., vocal works by Arcadelt, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and innumerable opera-writers; (b) 14 Rhapsodies on Hungarian themes, besides many other national works; (c) a quantity of original works, from brief and often very beautiful characteristic pieces up to extended concert-fantasias, études of extreme difficulty, 2 concertos and several other works with orchestra.
As a composer, Liszt seldom showed creative power of a high
order, except in smaller lyric forms, and many of his themes
are pretentious, but hollow. He was thoroughly impatient
of the limits and regularities of accepted form and style, and
struck off into vagaries of structure that seemed to his contemporaries
lawless. But he had gifts of sensational effect, of
grandiose sentiment, of coruscating decoration, and, while these
hardly constituted him a constructive artist of the first rank, his
application of them certainly broadened the scope of composition
and prepared the way for other composers of the most
modern type. His affiliation with Berlioz in this regard was
notable, and he may even be likened somewhat to Schumann,
though much inferior to him in positive imagination.
202. Rubinstein and Bülow.—Liszt gave a powerful impetus to interpretation as one of the functions of concert pianism. In this field were later conspicuous two other great players, whose careers were exactly parallel in years, but who were temperamentally and otherwise widely contrasted. One of them, Rubinstein, was not only a supereminent pianist, but an ambitious and abundant composer in the largest concerted forms, besides being the effective link in advanced musical culture between Germany and Russia—in one sense the progenitor of the modern Russian school. The other, Bülow, was likewise not only a pianist of the highest rank, but a most thorough and masterly orchestral and operatic conductor, a critical editor of musical scores, and one of the early promoters of Wagner's ideas. Both utilized their hold upon the public to restore to attention the whole range of keyboard composition,
