Of Mendelssohn he said: "Mendelssohn professed to be an 'absolutist'
in music. As a matter of fact, he stands on the same ground that Liszt
and Berlioz did; for almost everything he wrote, even to the smallest
piano piece, he furnished with an explanatory title.... Formalist
though he was, his work often exhibits eccentricities of form--as, for
instance, in the Scotch Symphony, where, in the so-called 'exposition'
of the first movement, he throws in an extra little theme that laps
over his frame with a jaunty disregard of the rules that is
delightful.... His technic of piano writing was perfect; compared with
Beethoven's it was a revelation. He never committed the fault of mere
virtuoso writing, which is remarkable when we consider how strong a
temptation there must have been to do so. In his piano music can be
found the germs of most of the pianistic innovations that are usually
identified with other composers--for instance, the manner of
enveloping the melody with runs, the discovery of which has been
ascribed to Thalberg, but which we find in Mendelssohn's first
Prelude, written in 1833. The interlocking passages which have become
so prevalent in modern music we find in his compositions dating from
1835."

Of Schumann he said happily: "His music is not avowed programme-music;
neither is it, as was much of Schubert's, pure delight in beautiful
sound. It did not break through formalism by sheer violence of
emotion, as did Beethoven's: it represents the rhapsodical revery of
an inspired poet to whom no imaginative vagary seems strange or alien,
and who has the faculty of relating his visions, never attempting to
give them coherence, and unaware of their character until perhaps
when, awakened from his dream, he naïvely wonders what they may have
meant--you remember that he added titles to his music after it was