composer who revealed the exquisite beauty and the great emotional power
of the freest modulation from key to key. His poetic impromptus for
piano became the model for Mendelssohn's "Songs without Words," and the
multitudinous forms of modern short pieces, while his melodious, dainty,
graceful valses were the forerunners of the exquisite dance-music which
subsequently made Vienna famous, and which reached its climax in Johann
Strauss the younger, universally known as "the waltz king."

In all these respects, Schubert was epoch-making; and if the beautiful
details he suggested to his successors up to the present day could be
taken out of their works there would be some surprising blanks.
Especially also is this true in the realm of lyric song, for, as
everybody knows, he practically created the art song as we know and love
it. The greatest of his immediate successors, Schumann and Franz,
cheerfully admitted that they could never have written such songs as
they gave the world but for Schubert, and the same confession might be
made by the latest of the great songwriters, Grieg, Richard Strauss, and
our American MacDowell. Schubert's best songs have never been equalled.
They belong in the realm of modern music quite as much as Wagner's
music-dramas and Liszt's symphonic poems.

Chopin is another composer who, although he died in 1849 (Schubert died
in 1828), is as modern as the masters just named. He was as boldly
original as Schubert, and as great a magician in the art of arousing
deep emotion by means of novel, unexpected modulations. As an originator
of new harmonic progressions he has had only three equals,--Bach,
Schubert, and Wagner. Harmonies as ultra-modern as those of Wagner's
"Parsifal" may be found in some of the mazurkas of Chopin. He was, as
Rubinstein called him, "the soul of the pianoforte." No one before or
after him knew how to make that instrument speak so eloquently. By