Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 31, 2025
For Englishmen the fact of the late Brinley Richards and Lindsay Sloper having been pupils of Chopin the one for a short, the other for a longer period will be of special interest. Adolph Gutmann was a boy of fifteen when in 1834 his father brought him to Paris to place him under Chopin.
Gutmann informed me that he brought the A flat major Sonata with him from Germany in 1836 or 1837, and that Chopin did not know it then. It is hard enough to believe that Liszt asked Lenz in 1828 if the composer of the "Freischutz" had also written for the piano, but Chopin's ignorance in 1836 is much more startling. Did fame and publications travel so slowly in the earlier part of the century?
When Gutmann presented himself in the small salon above alluded to, he found George Sand seated on an ottoman smoking a cigarette. She received the young man with great cordiality, telling him that his master had often spoken to her of him most lovingly. Chopin entered soon after from an adjoining apartment, and then they all went into the dining-room to have dinner.
Gutmann told me that in the early stages of his discipleship Chopin sometimes got very angry, and stormed and raged dreadfully; but immediately was kind and tried to soothe his pupil when he saw him distressed and weeping. Consequently, there were often des lecons orageuses, as it was called in the school idiom, and many a beautiful eye left the high altar of the Cite d'Orleans, Rue St.
Gutmann informed me that Chopin said to him one day when he was ill: "They have married me to Miss Stirling; she might as well marry death."
Still, of this nation were some of his best friends, among them Hiller, Gutmann, Albrecht, and the Hanoverian ambassador Baron von Stockhausen. In connection with this we must, however, not forget that the Germans of to-day differ from the Germans of fifty years ago as much socially as politically.
Lenz wishes to make us believe that George Sand's treatment of Chopin was unworthy of the great artist, but his statements are emphatically contradicted by Gutmann, who says that her behaviour towards him was always respectful.
In a letter dated London, 48, Dover Street, May 6, 1848, he writes to Gutmann: "Erard a ete charmant, il m'a fait poser un piano. J'ai un de Broadwood et un de Pleyel, ce qui fait 3, et je ne trouve pas encore le temps pour les jouer."
She visited him when she went in the following year to Paris. In his letter to Gutmann, Chopin speaks of his intention to give a matinee at a private house. And he more than realised it; for he not only gave one, but two the first at the house of Mrs. Here are two advertisements which appeared in the Times. June 15, 1848:
Chopin told his faithful Gutmann that "he had never in his life written another such melody," and once when hearing it raised his arms aloft and cried out: "Oh, ma patrie!" I cannot vouch for the sincerity of Chopin's utterance for as Runciman writes: "They were a very Byronic set, these young men; and they took themselves with ludicrous seriousness."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking