To begin with, there is no more usual failing, or one more damaging to good piano-playing, than too much use of the pedal, and its application in the wrong places. The pedal is really a very dangerous attraction to the inexperienced and yet enthusiastic performer. It is such an alluring temptation to hear the notes welling into one another, also the blur of sound produced by much pedalling covers up so many deficiencies of execution.
There is no doubt that the pedal carries with it a sort of special glamour of its own, so that even children when they first start learning the piano are always clamouring to be allowed to play with the pedal. It is their greatest ambition. Yet bad use of the pedal is quite capable of completely marring the effect of what might otherwise be a fine rendering of a piece of music. The pedal should be used to enhance, but never to cover up, and should be regarded as a means for producing certain definite tone-effects and variations of tone-colour at precise moments, and not as a sort of general mist of hot vapour or steam by which each note, passage and chord becomes enveloped.
Misuse of the pedal is a horrible fault, and can affect great and small alike; it should be carefully guarded against. Indeed, the state it produces on the mind of the listener is similar to that which overheated air creates in the lungs, namely, fatigue, nausea, lassitude, and even, alas, drowsiness!