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Simon Richault, of Paris, the publisher of the first- named edition, which appeared in 1860, says in the preface to it that Tellefsen had in his possession a collection of the works of Chopin corrected by the composer's own hand. As to the violoncello part of the Polonaise, it was printed as Franchomme always played it with the composer.
For the information which I am now going to give I am indebted to Mrs. Lyschinski. Among those who received Chopin at the Edinburgh railway station was Dr. Lyschinski who addressed him in Polish. Next day Miss Paterson, a neighbour, having placed her carriage at Chopin's disposal Mrs. Lyschinski took him out for a drive.
Her music drama, "The Cossacks," is her most ambitious work. Says Henry T. Finck, an able American music critic: "When I had revelled in the music of Chopin and Wagner, Liszt and Franz, to the point of intoxication, I fancied that the last word had been said in harmony and melody; when lo! I came across the songs and piano pieces of Grieg, and once more found myself moved to tears of delight."
As he sat at the piano playing Chopin, I thought of Busoni, of the Bechstein piano, of what fingers can do, of many other extraneous things, never of Chopin.
The rhythms of the Cradle Song and the Barcarolle are suggestive enough and if you please there are dew- drops in his cadenzas and there is the whistling of the wind in the last A minor Study. Of the A flat Study Chopin said: "Imagine a little shepherd who takes refuge in a peaceful grotto from an approaching storm.
He seated himself at the piano and played a Chopin waltz with decided sentiment and brilliancy; then, touching the keys idly for a moment or two, he struck a few chords of prelude and turned towards the woman who sat beside him.
Under a tent, as at a fair, he assembled the mangled masterpieces of Bach, Gluck, Beethoven, Weber, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, and to a gullible public sold the songs of these music-lords songs that should swim on high like great swan-clouds cleaving skies blue and inaccessible.
People knew the symphonies, the quartets of the middle period but little, the last ones not at all. Chopin, on being told by Lenz that Beethoven had in the F minor Quartet anticipated Mendelssohn, Schumann, and him; and that the scherzo prepared the way for his mazurka-fantasias, said: "Bring me this quartet, I do not know it."
For upwards of six years she treated Chopin with a mother's care; she had the passion of maternity in her towards them all, with whatever feelings it may have been complicated in her life of manifold experiences and with her artist temperament.
Things simply happened that way sometimes, and one was humbly thankful. "'Go on, he said. 'Don't stop. He sat in a corner of the sofa, and for a while the impetus of my start carried me on. Then the bottom dropped out of Chopin. I went over and sat in the other corner. It was a long sofa; it felt as long as the world.
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