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Updated: May 25, 2025
A year later she visited Paris in company with her father, and heard Chopin, Liszt, and Kalkbrenner, who on their part were delighted with the little artist, who, beneath the delicacy and timidity of the child, indicated extraordinary powers.
Such indeed were the lightness, delicacy, neatness, elegance, and gracefulness of Chopin's playing that they won for him the name of Ariel of the piano. The reader will remember how much Chopin admired these qualities in other artists, notably in Mdlle. Sontag and in Kalkbrenner.
Mendelssohn, who disliked Kalkbrenner and was angered at his arrogance in asking Chopin to study with him, "applauded furiously." "After this," Hiller writes, "nothing more was heard of Chopin's lack of technique." The criticisms were favorable. On May 20, 1832, Chopin appeared at a charity concert organized by Prince de la Moskowa.
He first studied under Zimmermann and Kalkbrenner, and afterward under Dourlen, Barbereau, Le Sueur, and Reicha. For successive years he carried off first prizes: for the piano in 1829; for harmony, in 1830; and in 1832 the highest honor in composition was awarded him, the Prix de Rome, which allowed him to go to Italy as a government stipendiary.
Liszt had already been before him in Paris, and Chopin arrived about the same time. Kalkbrenner, Ferdinand Hiller, and Field were playing, but the splendid, calm beauty of Thalberg's style instantly captivated the public, and elicited the most extravagant and delighted applause not only from the public, but from enlightened connoisseurs.
Niecks thinks Chopin might have learned of Kalkbrenner on the mechanical side. Chopin, in public, was modest about his attainments, looking upon himself as self-taught. "I cannot create a new school, because I do not even know the old," he said. It is this very absence of scholasticism that is both the power and weakness of his music. In reality his true technical ancestor was Hummel.
Kalkbrenner died but a short time before Chopin, but the sympathy existing between them was not strong enough to prevent their drifting apart. Other artists to whom the new-comer had paid due homage may have been neglected, forgotten, or lost sight of when success was attained and the blandishments of the salons were lavished upon him.
He tells all about the interview in a letter to Titus: "Are you a pupil of Field's?" was asked by Kalkbrenner, who remarked that Chopin had the style of Cramer and the touch of Field. Not having a standard by which to gauge the new phenomenon, Kalkbrenner was forced to fall back on the playing of men he knew.
Moscheles, a great pianist in an age of great players, gave it up in despair, and confessed that he could not play Chopin's music. The latter teaches the fingers to serve his own artistic uses, without regard to the notions of the schools. It is said that M. Kalkbrenner advised Chopin to attend his classes at the Paris Conservatoire, that the latter might learn the proper fingering.
Chopin, himself, modest as he was in his manners, wrote to his teacher Elsner, in 1831, when he was twenty-two years of age: "Kalkbrenner will not be able to break my perhaps bold but noble determination to create a new epoch in art." Now, why has the world been so slow in recognizing that Chopin stands in the very front rank of creative musicians?
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