sounding phrases about the duty of the interpreter to subordinate himself to the composer, and against what I am about to say, I nevertheless make bold to affirm that it is the province of the virtuoso to express himself, his own personality, his moods, his temperament, his subjective or even his subconscious self, through music; and in music that is purely contrapuntal there is a barrier to this individual power of expression.

The Mission of the Player.

We often hear it said of the greatest contemporary pianist that he is a great Chopin player, but not a great Bach player. He could not be, and at the same time be the greatest living virtuoso. It is the worshiper of tradition, the reserved, continent, scholarly player, the player who converts a Chopin nocturne into an icicle and a Schubert impromptu into a snowball, who revels in counterpoint—the player who always is slavishly subordinating himself to what he is pleased to call the “composer’s intentions” and forgets that the truly great virtuoso creates when he interprets. Some times the virtuoso may go too far and depart too much 60 from the character of the piece he is playing, subjecting it more than is permissible to his temporary mood; but it is better for art to err on the side of originality, provided it is not bizarre or freakish, than on the side of subserviency to tradition.

While I have no desire, in writing as above, to exalt unduly the virtuoso, the interpreter of music, at the expense of the composer, I must insist that the great player also is creative, in the sense that every time he plays a work he creates it over again from his own point of view, and thus has at least a share in its parentage. Indeed, it seems more difficult to attain exalted rank as a virtuoso than to gain immortality as a composer. The world has produced two epoch-making