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Her success has been complete; in hearing her, statesmen were moved...and the young ladies, those who are good musicians, forgave her her prettiness. Karasowski makes also mention of Casimir Wernik, who died at St. Petersburg in 1859, and of Gustav Schumann, a teacher of the piano at Berlin, who, however, was only during the winter of 1840-1841 with the Polish master.
There the pupils of the Conservatory sang a cantata by Elsner, and after a banquet he was given a silver goblet filled with Polish earth, being adjured, so Karasowski relates, never to forget his country or his friends wherever he might wander.
Karasowski gives the date of the first complete edition of the Chopin works as 1846, with Gebethner & Wolff, Warsaw, as publishers. Then, according to Niecks, followed Tellefsen, Klindworth Bote & Bock Scholtz Peters Breitkopf & Hartel, Mikuli, Schuberth, Kahnt, Steingraber better known as Mertke's and Schlesinger, edited by the great pedagogue Theodor Kullak.
Karasowski, on the other hand, maintains that it was not Madame Sand who was induced to accompany Chopin, but that Madame Sand induced Chopin to accompany her. Neither of these statements tallies with Madame Sand's own account.
Later on he became very deaf, and this great trouble was followed by a still greater one, the death of his wife. Thus left deaf and poor, he despaired, and, putting a pistol to one of his ears, blew out his brains. According to Karasowski he died at Paris in 1870. He is said to have published also two books, one on Polish orthography in 1866 and one on popular astronomy in 1869.
But the Nocturne in G, op. 37, No. 2, is charming. Painted with Chopin's most ethereal brush, without the cloying splendors of the one in D flat, the double sixths, fourths and thirds are magically euphonious. The second subject, I agree with Karasowski, is the most beautiful melody Chopin ever wrote. It is in true barcarolle vein; and most subtle are the shifting harmonic hues.
Karasowski labours hard to surpass Enault, but is not like him a master of the ars artem celare. The weather, he tells us, was dull and damp, and had a depressing effect on the mind of Chopin. No friend had visited him during the day, no book entertained him, no musical idea gladdened him.
Skipping the fine description of the brilliant company assembled in the salon, the enumeration of the topics on which the conversation ran, and the observation that Chopin, being disinclined to talk, seated himself in a corner and watched the beautiful ladies as they glided hither and thither, we will join Karasowski again where, after the departure of the greater number of the guests, Chopin goes to the piano and begins to improvise.
For Schumann this Scherzo is Byronic in tenderness and boldness. Karasowski speaks of its Shakespearian humor, and indeed it is a very human and lovable piece of art. It holds richer, warmer, redder blood than the other three and like the A flat Ballade, is beloved of the public. But then it is easier to understand.
Chopin was delighted, for he was malicious in a dainty way. "What do you think of this?" he writes. "I, a dangerous seducteur!" The Paris letters to his parents were unluckily destroyed, as Karasowski relates, by Russian soldiers in Warsaw, September 19, 1863, and with them were burned his portrait by Ary Scheffer and his first piano. The loss of the letters is irremediable.
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