Few composers have been more inventive. No
composer has ever scattered abroad ideas with more liberal hand.
Compositions like the B-minor piano-sonata, the tone-poem "Mazeppa," the
"Dante" symphony, whatever their artistic value, fairly teem with
original themes of a high order, are like treasure houses in which gold
ornaments lie negligently strewn in piles. Indeed, your inventive power
supplied not only your own compositions with material, but those of your
son-in-law, Richard Wagner, as well. As James Huneker once so brightly
put it, "Wagner was indebted to you for much besides money, sympathy,
and a wife." For Siegmund and Sieglinde existed a long while in your
"Dante" symphony before Wagner transferred them to "Die Walkuere";
Parsifal and Kundry a long while in your piano-sonata before he
introduced them into his "Buehnenweihfestspiel."
You were equipped for piano-composition as was no other of your time.
For you the instrument was a newer, stranger, more virgin thing than it
was for either Schumann or Chopin. You knew even better than they how to
listen for its proper voice. You were more deeply aware than they of its
proper color and quality. You seem to have come to it absolutely without
preconceived ideas. Your B-minor sonata, however unsatisfactory its
actual quality, remains one of the magistral works of the sort.
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