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It is vivacious, dolce indeed, and most cleverly constructed. Klindworth gives a more binding character to the first double notes. Another gleam of the Chopin sunshine. Storm clouds gather in the G sharp minor, the twelfth prelude, so unwittingly imitated by Grieg in his Menuetto of the same key, and in its driving presto we feel the passionate clench of Chopin's hand.
FROM the date of 1840, the health of Chopin, affected by so many changes, visibly declined. During some years, his most tranquil hours were spent at Nohant, where he seemed to suffer less than elsewhere. He composed there, with pleasure, bringing with him every year to Paris several new compositions, but every winter caused him an increase of suffering.
The most probable account seems to be that according to which Chopin mortally wounded Sand by receiving her daughter and her son-in-law when they were out of Sand's favour. All are agreed that it was Sand and not Chopin who ended the relationship, and that she, as Niecks bluntly puts it, "had recourse to the heroic means of kicking him, metaphorically speaking, out-of-doors."
Not content with identifying the intolerable, though it must be owned severely-tested, Prince Karol with Chopin, imaginative writers have gone so far as to assert that the book was conceived and written from an express design on the novelist's part to bring about the breach of a link she was beginning to find irksome!
Surprise was dead in Archie where the Governor was concerned; he could only marvel at the ease and finish with which the man made the room vibrate with the most exquisite melodies of Schumann, Chopin, MacDowell. He played for half an hour without airs or affectations, things that bruised and hurt the spirit by their very tenderness and wistfulness.
...It was only rarely, at very distant intervals, that Chopin played in public; but what would have been for anyone else an almost certain cause of oblivion and obscurity was precisely what assured to him a fame above the caprices of fashion, and kept him from rivalries, jealousies, and injustice.
When Pachmann plays Chopin the music sings itself, as if without the intervention of an executant, of one who stands between the music and our hearing. The music has to intoxicate him before he can play with it; then he becomes its comrade, in a kind of very serious game; himself, in short, that is to say inhuman.
He and the "Creole Chopin," Louis Moreau Gottschalk, attracted much attention by several joint appearances in our musical centres of the time. Thalberg was a pupil of Hummel, and felt the influence of his teacher's cold, severely classic style.
Then Mary rose and played a little, very softly, in the darkness, morsels of Chopin, until the footman came in with a bright lamp, announcing that dinner was on the table. And Charles Sylvester had not arrived. He atoned for this breach of his habit, however, on the morrow by making an early call upon the two ladies, whom he found alone, immediately after luncheon.
It may be seen that Chopin was a restless, though not roving nature. In later years his inability to remain settled in one place bore a pathological impress, consumptives are often so. The Paris of 1831, the Paris of arts and letters, was one of the most delightful cities in the world for the culture-loving.
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