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Updated: June 14, 2025
Gutmann's account does not tally in several of its details with Moscheles'. As, however, Moscheles does not give us reminiscences, but sober, business-like notes taken down at the time they refer to, and without any attempt at making a nice story, he is the safer authority.
The few indications we find in Beethoven's works prove that this genius began to see some of the as yet latent possibilities. Of the virtuosi, Moscheles was the first who made a more extensive and artistic use of the pedals, although also he employed them sparingly compared with his above-named younger contemporaries. Every pianist of note has, of course, his own style of pedalling.
Moscheles wrote to his wife that Chopin's "ad libitum playing, which, with the interpreters of his music degenerates into offences against correct time, is, in his own case, merely a pleasing originality of style." He compares him to "a singer who, little concerned with the accompaniment, follows entirely his feelings."
Hence I have not the heart to controvert Moscheles who, in his diary, says some cutting things about this work: "In composition Chopin proves that he has only isolated happy thoughts which he does not know how to work up into a rounded whole. And he may also be right when he says:
He had studied under Moscheles at the Conservatorio of Leipsic, the city of Bach and Mendelssohn fame; and there, from the days of his boyhood, he had belonged to the little circle of intimates who frequently gathered around the master at his house.
It is stated that the beautiful numbers of the "Carneval" were due largely, if not wholly, to her inspiration, which at that time reached its highest point. He himself noted this coincidence in a letter to Moscheles, and built the themes of the various numbers almost wholly upon them. However this may be, he certainly had a great admiration for Clara even in her early years.
Mendelssohn's early death, while yet in the very prime of creative genius, was a stunning blow to Moscheles; more so, perhaps, than would have occurred from the loss of any one except his beloved wife, the mother of his five children. Our musician died himself, in Leipzig, March 10, 1870, and his passage from this world was as serene and quiet as his passage through had been.
At the age of fourteen young Thalberg went to London in the household of his father, who had been appointed imperial ambassador to England, and the youth was then placed under the instruction of the great pianist Moscheles. The latter speaks of Thalberg as the most distinguished of his pupils, and as being, even at that age, already an artist of distinction and mark.
When Beethoven, in the early part of 1827, was in dire distress from poverty, just before his death, it was to Moscheles that he applied for assistance; and it was this generous friend who promptly arranged the concert with the Philharmonic Society by which one hundred pounds sterling was raised to alleviate the dying moments of the great man whom his own countrymen would have let starve, even as they had allowed Schubert and Mozart to suffer the direst want on their deathbeds.
This last statement is confirmed by some remarks of Moscheles which have already been quoted namely, that Chopin's piano was breathed forth so softly that he required no vigorous forte to produce the desired contrasts; and that one did not miss the orchestral effects which the German school demanded from a pianist, but allowed one's self to be carried away as by a singer who takes little heed of the accompaniment and follows his own feelings.
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