In 1828, the firm of Richault issued the Op. 1 of a 14-year-old prodigy, Charles-Valentin Morhange—already subscribing himself as Alkan—who, after carrying off several first prizes at the Paris Conservatoire, started making a considerable stir in aristocratic salons as a pianist of preternatural powers. It was in the salon of the Princess de la Moskova that he encouneterd Liszt——a defining shock that occasioned a sleepless, tearful night and a tacit, lifelong rivalry. For while perhaps evenly matched in pianistic genius, they were antithetical natures to which the coming decade would bring a wary friendship. Something of the efflorescent spontaneity and untamed extravagance of Liszt's playing at this time can be gleaned from the so-called Malédiction Concerto for piano and strings, composed in 1827, whose "chaotic beauties" Moscheles noted. Alkan's Variations sur un thème de Steibelt, on the other hand, demonstrate little more than proficient brilliance carried off in crisp finger work. The choice of the insipid rondo pastoral from the third "Orage" piano concerto of Daniel Steibelt (1765—1823), in which the imitation of a storm continued to enjoy a tremendous vogue from its first performance in 1798, forecasts Alkan's preoccupation with the "hits" of the day, which deepened into an exacting and often satirical stylistic awareness. But Alkan's variations remain politely decorative if pianistically effusive in the pleasantly banal manner that provided a heavy industry for such contemporary virtuosi as Kalkbrenner, Pixis, Czerny, Herz, Thalberg, the young César Franck, and hundreds of others now forgotten. Steibelt, too, belongs in this company. Though this musical adventurer and shady dealer enjoyed a tremendous success as a composer and teacher, he is recalled today—if at all—as a pianist defeated and humiliated in a contest with Beethoven in 1800, one of the archetypal encounters of genius with mediocrity. But if Alkan's starched fripperies fall short of announcing genius, as Liszt's Malédiction Concerto palpably does, they exhibit a precocious mastery of the day's pianistic lingua franca against which he would define himself—grotesquely transmogrifying or grandly ennobling its most threadbare features—as he entered his twenties. Indeed, the originality of the Études (12) ou Caprices, Opp. 12, 13, 15, and 16, that followed in 1833—though still startling—can hardly be appreciated without reference to the virtuoso flimflam off of which they play.

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