Despite individual (sometimes significant) differences between the virtuosos of that epoch, the vast majority of them were trained in the traditions of Romanticism. However, the times of the flowering of this style in piano playing, the times of Liszt and Rubinstein were already past, and the style leaned toward decadence. The concert repertoire consisted of a limited number of composers and compositions. The classicism of the eighteenth century seemed a cold and obsolete art, Bach—an esteemed museum relic. “How many of his works can no longer appeal to us!” wrote the famous pianist Eugen d'Albert in the foreword to his edition of the Well-Tempered Clavier. “I know that there are those who can listen to the cantatas without showing boredom. But they are either hypocrites or pedants.”I Not surprisingly, Bach and Mozart were almost never performed in concert, or were played for formality's sake at the very beginning of the program, as a prelude to the “real” concert. The piano repertoire began “seriously” with Beethoven, and reached its apogee in Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Chopin, in whose compositions Hofmann, Paderewski, and many other renowned performers of the day gained their laurels. Liszt was popular chiefly as the author of transcriptions and effective virtuoso pieces; his more important original works appeared in the programs much more rarely.