Virtuosity is the dream of every adventurous pianist, coupled with the taste for risk, and almost for the random, staging and endangering, and of the extreme. This was not unknown to the young Béla Bartók. Slipping into the magician’s suit, young, handsome, and charming as was Franz Liszt, himself borrowing the lyricism and madness of ‘gypsy’ musicians’ improvisation without too many ethnological scruples, he ‘surfed’ from glissandos to tremolos, vying with Paganini’s violin. He was to assert himself in a society marked by the successes of performing musicians whose fame was, in this end of an era, beginning to be almost more important than that of the composers.