The rise of the virtuoso pianist during the Romantic period
led to a serious decline in the public’s
appreciation of quiet musicianship.
As a result, so much of the best music from the nineteenth
century and earlier did not appeal to audiences, who had come to expect
the cannonading and empty pyrotechnics of the
worst (though often the most admired) demonstrative virtuosos.
It was a problem that persisted well into this century in the playing
of Ignace Paderewski and Josef Hofmann, and culminated in the
highly charged performances of Vladimir Horowitz.

There is an anecdote from César Saerchinger’s biography Artur Schnabel (1957)
that illustrates the difference between mere virtuosity and
genuine musicianship.
After the eleven-year-old Schnabel began studying with the
famed Viennese pedagogue
Theodor Leschetizky in 1893, the teacher
quickly took stock of the pupil and uttered a judgment that was also
an admonition: “Artur,” he intoned, “you will never be a pianist.
You are a musician.” To that end, Leschetizky forbade his student
such works as the Hungarian Rhapsodies of Franz Liszt, and instead
directed his attentions to piano works by Schubert, then
lying in
oblivion
—“Schubert has written fifteen sonatas for piano which
almost nobody knows. They are absolutely forgotten. No one ever
plays them. You might like them.”
Of course, it was
Schnabel’s later recordings
of Schubert’s impromptus, Moments Musicaux, and many of the sonatas that
brought these works back into the musical repertory.

The instructive distinction between a mere pianist and