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I send you a reconnaissance for Pleyel, it astonishes me that he absolutely wants it, as if he could not trust me and you. Dear me, this Pleyel who said that Schlesinger paid me badly! 500 francs for a manuscript for all the countries seems to him too dear! I assure you I prefer to deal with a real Jew. And Probst, that good-for-nothing fellow, who pays me 300 francs for my mazurkas!
I passed Sunday P.M. with Rakemann; he played all the time, told me of you and Boston and his love for it, asked me if I had heard more of the concerts you mentioned. Timm on Monday played me the "Invitation to the W." very beautifully, beside some Mazurkas of Chopin, also the "Egmont" overture grandly. Saturday evening the second Philharmonic, the "Jupiter Symphony," and some Septuats, etc.
Opus 1, a Rondo in C minor, dedicated to Madame de Linde, saw the light in 1825, but it was preceded by two polonaises, a set of variations, and two mazurkas in G and B flat major. Schumann declared that Chopin's first published work was his tenth, and that between op. 1 and 2 there lay two years and twenty works. Be this as it may, one cannot help liking the C minor Rondo.
Though a Jew, he had a fairly good Polish pronunciation, and was particularly fond of the national songs, of which he had brought back a multitude from each trip over the Niemen, kolomyjkas70 from Halicz and mazurkas from Warsaw.
Mihalevitch spoke about music; she sat down without ceremony to the piano, and very correctly played some of Chopin's mazurkas, which were then just coming into fashion. Dinner-time came; Lavretsky would have gone away, but they made him stay: at dinner the general regaled him with excellent Lafitte, which the general's lackey hurried off in a street-sledge to Dupre's to fetch.
The C minor Polonaise of this opus was never, is not now, a favorite. The mazurkas generally received the title of Souvenir de la Pologne. In commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Chopin, October 17, 1899, a medal was struck at Warsaw, bearing on one side an artistically executed profile of the Polish composer.
Chopin was bound to develop, and his Mazurkas, fragile and constricted as is the form, were sure to show a like record of spiritual and intellectual growth. Opus 56, in B major, is elaborate, even in its beginning. There is decoration in the ritornelle in E flat and one feels the absence of a compensating emotion, despite the display of contrapuntal skill.
It ends with Rubinstein's sign and seal, an arpeggio in sixths, which is as trite a musical finis as fiction's "They lived happily ever afterward, surrounded by a large circle of admiring friends." Three mazurkas constitute opus 125. They are closely modelled on Chopin, and naturally lack the first-handedness of these works, in which, almost alone, the Pole was witty.
He had also begun to compose; indeed these efforts started soon after he began piano lessons, and before he could handle a pen. His teacher had to write down what the little composer played. Among those early pieces were mazurkas, polonaises, valses and the like. At the age of ten he dedicated a march to Grand Duke Constantine, who had it scored for band and played on parade.
Chopin, while piquantly and daringly varying the tonality prevailing in art-music, hardly ever departs from it altogether he keeps at least in contact with it, however light that contact may be now and then in the mazurkas. Further, he adopted only some of the striking peculiarities of the national music, and added to them others which were individual.
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