gifted "age of the future" protests against such cold conservatism. The
period of piano fury which I have lived to see, and which I have just
described, was the introduction to this new essay, only a feeble
attempt, and a preliminary to this piano future. Should this senseless
raging and storming upon the piano, where not one idea can be
intelligently expressed in a half-hour, this abhorrent and rude
treatment of a grand concert piano, combined with frightful misuse of
both pedals, which puts the hearer into agonies of horror and spasms of
terror, ever be regarded as any thing but a return to barbarism, devoid
of feeling and reason? This is to be called music! music of the future!
the beauty of the future style! Truly, for this style of music, the ears
must be differently constructed, the feelings must be differently
constituted, and a different nervous system must be created! For this
again we shall need surgeons, who lie in wait in the background with the
throat improvers. What a new and grand field of operations lies open to
them! Our age produces monsters, who are insensible to the plainest
truths, and who fill humanity with horror. Political excesses have
hardly ceased, when still greater ones must be repeated in the world of
music. But comfort yourselves, my readers: these isolated instances of
madness, these last convulsions of musical insanity, with however much
arrogance they may be proclaimed, will not take the world by storm. The
time will come when no audience, not even eager possessors of
complimentary tickets, but only a few needy hirelings, will venture to
endure such concert performances of "the future."

* * * * *

I ought to express myself more fully with regard to expression in
piano-playing. It is difficult to perform this task, at least in
writing; for it can more easily be practically explained to individual