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"Before I met him," says Strauss, "I had been brought up on strictly classical lines; I had lived entirely on Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven, and had just been studying Mendelssohn, Chopin, Schumann, and Brahms. It is to Ritter alone I am indebted for my knowledge of Liszt and Wagner; it was he who showed me the importance of the writings and works of these two masters in the history of art.
Liszt calls Chopin "a fine connoisseur in raillery and an ingenious mocker." The testimony of other acquaintances of Chopin and that of his letters does not allow us to accept as holding good generally Mr. Halle's experience, who, mentioning also the Polish artist's wit, said to me that he never heard him utter a sarcasm or use a cutting expression.
Which latter statement is slightly condescending. Recollect, however, Chopin's calm depreciation of Schumann. Mr. John F. Runciman, the English critic, asserts that "Chopin thought in terms of the piano, and only the piano. So when we see Chopin's orchestral music or Wagner's music for the piano we realize that neither is talking his native tongue the tongue which nature fitted him to speak."
As Ehlert says, "Noblesse oblige and thus Chopin felt himself compelled to satisfy all demands exacted of a pianist, and wrote the unavoidable piano concerto. It was not consistent with his nature to express himself in broad terms. His lungs were too weak for the pace in seven league boots, so often required in a score.
Chopin, his heart full of sorrow, left home, parents, friends, and "ideal," severed with his youth, and went forth in the world with the keyboard and a brain full of beautiful music as his only weapons. At Kaliz he was joined by the faithful Titus, and the two went to Breslau, where they spent four days, going to the theatre and listening to music.
For the rest the study must be played like the wind, or, as Kullak says: "Apart from a few places and some accents, the Etude is to be played almost throughout in that Chopin whisper. The right hand must play its thirds, especially the diatonic and chromatic scales, with such equality that no angularity of motion shall be noticeable where the fingers pass under or over each other.
She had been taught in her girlhood to fondle and cherish those long-necked, sinuous creatures, the phrases of Chopin, so free, so flexible, so tactile, which begin by seeking their ultimate resting-place somewhere beyond and far wide of the direction in which they started, the point which one might have expected them to reach, phrases which divert themselves in those fantastic bypaths only to return more deliberately with a more premeditated reaction, with more precision, as on a crystal bowl which, if you strike it, will ring and throb until you cry aloud in anguish to clutch at one's heart.
There is a pathetic exception in the outward lives of so many men of genius, the bloom being, to the instructed eye, only the indication of some subtle nervous derangement, only the forerunner of decay." The overmastering cerebral agitation that obsessed Wagner's life, was as with Chopin a symptom, not a sickness; but in the latter it had not yet assumed a sinister turn.
Chopin embraces you a thousand times. He is always qui, qui, qui, me, me, me. Rollinat smokes like a steam-boat. In the summer of 1840 George Sand did not go to Nohant, and Chopin seems to have passed most of, if not all, the time in Paris. From a letter addressed to her half-brother, we learn that the reason of her staying away from her country-seat was a wish to economise:
When Pachmann plays a Prelude of Chopin, all that Chopin was conscious of saying in it will, no doubt, be there; it is all there, if Godowsky plays it; every note, every shade of expression, every heightening and quickening, everything that the notes actually say.
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