Some of the Etudes in the first set, opus 10, were written by the time Chopin was twenty. It is with these pieces that Chopin's style was fully revea… - Charles Rosen

Everything depends, of course, on the shape of the hand, and it must be stressed that there is no type of hand which is more suited to the piano than another. One of the greatest pianists that I ever heard—certainly the most remarkable in his control of the widest possible range and variety of tone color—was Josef Hoffman, who had a hand so small that he could reach no more than an octave; Steinway built him a special piano in which the ivories were slightly narrower so that he could reach a ninth. His friend Sergei Rachmaninov had a very large hand, as did Rudolf Serkin, and Sviatoslav Richter could not only reach a twelfth but could play the last chord of the Schumann Toccata without arpeggiation—an effect which would certainly have astonished the composer. My teacher, Moriz Rosenthal, famous for his technique, had a small hand with stubby fingers; Vladimir Horowitz's fingers were exceptionally long, while Robert Casadesus had fingers so thick that he had trouble fitting them in between the black keys. There is no such thing as an ideal pianist's hand.

Critical evaluation was transformed into understanding, and criticism became not an act of judgment but of comprehension.

By the late eighteenth century, there is a sad and permanent decline in the quality of music written for young performers or beginners: one has only to compare Bach's Album for Anna Magdalena Bach and the Two-Part Inventions with anything that came later. No composer of importance between Bach and Schumann turned his hand to writing for children, and Schumann's essays came after his years of greatest inspiration for piano writing had gone. (Mozart is the odd exception, but then he was, in fact, almost incapable of writing really easy pieces: he no doubt believed that his Sonata in D Major, K.576, was easy, perhaps because all the hard passages in the first movement were in simple two-part counterpoint, one voice in each hand, but he was wrong.)