These find their most popular expression in the conclusion of the Serenade, in the first movement of the D minor Concerto, and in the E minor Prelude. Popular even ad nauseam are the Concert-pieces, the B minor capriccio (the favourite fantasia with march-conclusion), and the two piano concertos, all of which are practically in one movement, with partial repeats. In technique these appear to owe an obligation to Weber, for whom Mendelssohn had a heartfelt admiration.

The third group of Mendelssohn’s piano works, along with the “Short Stories” and the concertos, are the “Bachiana,” or, more properly, “Handeliana.” An æsthetic historic sense is a rooted characteristic of the romantic spirit. Mendelssohn’s studies in Bach and Handel had a great influence on his development, and are plainly shown in some of the “Seven Character-Pieces,” with their soft, gentle, old-world conduct of the melodies, and the clever fugal movement which seems to set an ancient counterpoint on to Mendelssohnian harmonies. Here belongs the Fantasia, Op. 28, with its three contrapuntal movements; also the famous E minor fugue and its companions in Op. 35, with the appended chorale and the pompously smooth partwriting, fall into this place. It is constructed entirely differently from the fugue of Bach, which grows up from within; it is a grafting of a fugato on the trunk of a drawing-room piece. Finally, we recall the “Variations sérieuses,” composed in 1841, the purest, most solid, most massive work that Mendelssohn ever wrote for the piano, without a suspicion of triviality, filled full with intellectual outlines and harmonies, a splendid erection, but—throughout dependent on Schumann.

We have thus returned to Schumann, whom Mendelssohn so nobly repaid for his admiration. This elegant composer, who, whether as poet, as concertist, or as a follower of Bach, was always equally clear and plastic, might well appear to Schumann the fulfilment of his own aims. He had not wavered as to whether he was called to be a musician, though he had perhaps regarded business as the easier course. At his pieces he had toiled as Heine toiled at one of those smooth-flowing poems of his. The doubt may well have often recurred to him whether the flow was checked. But from this Mendelssohn the music flowed so easily from the fingers, and stood so clear and transparent before him. At one time he believes that the stream is clear, and he rejoices over the speed with which he finishes twelve sheets in a week. This work was the “Humoreske,” which entirely puts aside the earlier fragmentary romance, and throws all, joy and sorrow, into the same crucible. Thus we gain a piece bearing all the marks of decadent imitation of Bach’s traditions, and even of those of Schumann himself, in spite of isolated, delicate, lyrical traits, which occur specially in the G minor section (Einfach und Zart). We are now in March 1839. Schumann writes to Clara, asking her why she chooses the Carnival to introduce him to people who do not know him. Why not rather choose the Fantasie Stücke, in which one does not nullify the other, and in which there is a comfortable breadth? “You like best storm and lightning at once, and always something new that has never been.” Then also he put his “Arabesque” and his “Blumen-stück” together, which has nothing but the title in common with Jean Paul. As a matter of fact, nothing was new, and everything had been. It had become a question whether the limits of the possibilities of the piano had not already been overpassed. As Op. 22 he brought out the Sonata in G minor, which he had composed earlier; a piece, compared with the F sharp minor, rounded and of satisfying content. The final pithy movement he replaced by one of neater and smoother character. It is sad to hear him, in his letters, speaking with great empressement of the Nacht-stücke (Op. 23) and then to find that there is nothing special in them. As Op. 26 appeared the “Carnival Jest” (Faschings-schwank) which brought back his old style of the “short story,” but forced into a sort of sonata-arrangement. The vigorous “Reveillé” in F sharp major, the fine painting of the restless bustle, the beautiful Romance, the delicate simplicity of the Scherzino, with its canonic conclusion, the singing Intermezzo, which in breadth and value on the whole surpassed Mendelssohn—all these have ill prepared us for the great falling off in the Finale. This piece was Schumann’s last great utterance on the “subjective” piano. In the meanwhile the Song had taken him captive, and dominated his whole nature. In Schumann development proceeded almost according to classes. After the Song came chamber-music, then chorus, then the symphony.

Among his later piano-pieces we find all sorts in various styles—partly interesting as showing an advance upon himself, partly, alas, mere decadent imitations of himself. The fulness of ideas and of titles is quite astonishing in his “Jugendalbum,” in his “Albumblätter” containing the dainty Slumber Song, and in the “Bunte Blätter” containing the Geschwind-marsch. The most delicate aftermath of Romance proper was the “Waldscenen” in which the “Eintritt” and the “Verrufene Stelle” are worthy of a musical Hoffmann. The Hunting Song is in the style of Mendelssohn. As late fruits of the intimate piano lyric appear the sweet variations for two pianos, which we cannot choose but love, the four-handed Eastern Pictures (Bilder aus dem Osten), in which Chopin plays a part, and the Songs of Early Morning, and to Bettina, which show a beautiful touch of a later style, often reaching the borders of motives from Parsifal. But most important were certain concertos. Of these the limpid A minor, dedicated to Hiller—the first movement of which was composed earlier—in its freedom and colouring recalling Beethoven, and finally showing traces of Chopin’s influence, is a perfect work. Finally, we must not omit the Concert Allegro (Op. 134) dedicated to Brahms, a brilliant creation, often recalling Bach, with a theme very much in the style of Brahms, and many interesting repetitions of earlier figures of Schumann’s own. Why has it been almost forgotten?

Like Schubert throughout his music, so has Schumann in his chamber-music left us his youth. He broke off the regular practice of it at about the same time of life as that at which Schubert died. During the next fourteen years a slow decline in the artistic freshness of his works made itself noticeable; and finally, alas, his genius deserted him.

At this time some one wrote: “Thalberg is a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz a lawyer, Kalkbrenner a troubadour, Madame Pleyel a sibyl, Döhler a pianist.” The reader will observe that Schumann is not even mentioned in this list. In Paris, as yet, he did not count. There was an utter absence of the frivolous in his music, and it had none of the qualities which were likely to conquer the great world. Chopin scarcely ever required his pupils to play the works of Schumann, and would seem to have had very little taste for them. On the other hand, it was Schumann who gave an impulse to the popularity of Chopin’s works in his magazine, as early as the appearance of the Variations on the theme “Reich’ mir die Hand” (Op. 2). Indeed, the rapid and enduring fame in Germany of Schumann’s only true rival was due to Schumann himself.

“Chopin a poet.” It has become a very bad habit to place this poet in the hands of our youth. The concertos and polonaises being put aside, no one lends himself worse to youthful instruction than Chopin. Because his delicate touches inevitably seem perverse to the youthful mind, he has gained the name of a morbid genius. The grown man who understands how to play Chopin, whose music begins where that of another leaves off, whose tones show the supremest mastery in the tongue of music,—such a man will discover nothing morbid in him. Chopin, a Pole, strikes sorrowful chords, which do not occur frequently to healthy normal persons. But why is a Pole to receive less justice than a German? We know that the extreme of culture is closely allied to decay; for perfect ripeness is but the foreboding of corruption. Children, of course, do not know this. And Chopin himself would have been much too noble ever to lay bare his mental sickness to the world. And his greatness lies precisely in this, that he preserves the mean between immaturity and decay.

His greatness is his aristocracy. He stands among musicians in his faultless vesture, a noble from head to foot. The sublimest emotions, towards whose refinement whole generations had tended, the last things in our soul, whose foreboding is interwoven with the mystery of the Judgment Day, have in his music found their form. At this Judgment Day appears to be expressed what man kept dark within himself, and shuddering sought to hide from the light. Now it has become free without becoming plebeian; it has been uttered without becoming trivial. This miracle is sung by geniuses, who are not cold as marble, nor of such unreal beauty that we, to our horror, are constrained to believe that there is an anti-human classicism. No; the angels bear those delicate features as they weave nobility and joy into one. These are Polish piquancies, tender and shining eyes of inner fire, with happy heavy lids, and gently curved outlines, in which pride and spirit blend together; speaking lips, which have something sweet to say, and gentle, melting contours.

Chopin once said of himself that he was in this world like the E string of a violin on a contrabass. His finely-strung nature sought retirement, and fate had given him precisely that longing for rest and harmony which of necessity made the contrabass of this world excessively painful to him. He ran restlessly from one abode to another, till he found in the Place de Vendôme the best for dying in; he became more and more retiring, called for peaceful pearl-gray carpets, and gave full play to all his decorative emotions, which are the external proof of a harmonic soul. The art of his life was driven into isolation, into inclusion in the sacred recesses of his musical poems; and he knew well how so to level his life to the external observer, that the biographers—apart from his one great passion—had never so uneventful a life to record. The well-known description of an evening with the master, which Liszt gives in his fanciful but yet so true biography of Chopin, is so rich in character that reality itself could hardly have done it better. A melting twilight in the room, the dark corners seeming to produce themselves into infinity, the furniture covered with white hangings, no candle except by the piano and by the fireside. We distinguish Heine, Meyerbeer, the tenor Nourrit, Hiller Delacroix, the unemotional Minkiewicz, the gray-haired Niemcewicz, and George Sand with propped arm leaning back in a chair. The people stand round Chopin in the twilight, and hardly know whence these magic tones come. [The English reader will recall the exquisite description of Chopin’s playing in Crawford’s romance “With the Immortals.”]

We can easily see why Chopin could never compose duets. Not only did he devote himself exclusively to the piano—he wrote nothing in which the piano does not bear a part—but he broke with the custom of writing duets for one or two pianos. A single Rondo for two pianos, of the year 1828, was found among his remains. How he smiled once at Czerny, who “had composed another overture for eight pianos and sixteen persons, and was very happy over it.” Chopin opened to the two hands a wider world than Czerny could give to thirty-two. And further, he selects and rejects with great care before publishing. He prints nothing which does not absolutely satisfy his mind both as a whole and in its details.

Between his youth in Poland—which was soon closed to him on political grounds—and his last journey through England and Scotland, his stay in France stretches like a peaceful background of exclusively artistic activity. A thousand anecdotes cluster round him, but only a few of them have stood the test of criticism and comparison. In his “Life of Chopin”—and there are few musical biographies equally good—Niecks has collected everything that is told, and all the arguments against the authenticity of the various tales. Even upon that famous scene, in which the Countess Potocka sings the dying Chopin to his eternal slumber, the traditions are contradictory. There are few letters to help us. Chopin was too reserved to write them. It was said that he would rather go right through Paris to decline an invitation by word of mouth than write his excuse. And of the few letters he actually did write, the best appear to have been burnt in the sack of Warsaw. Nevertheless there is a certain charm in being thus obliged, as it were, to see him in shadow.

That enigmatical daemon, whom fate had allowed to grow up within the walls of Paris—George Sand—was Chopin’s one grand passion. This was his one overmastering emotion—but its influence never faded. The beginning and the end of their association were varied a hundredfold. His love for her seems to have begun in hate and to have ended in it; hers began in dreaming, and ended with emotion; and, as she carried through the episode in actual life with bel esprit, so she clothed it poetically with the same. Who can reproach a Don Juan nature with wickedness? George Sand must have been wicked to play her vampire-part to the end. But there was nothing petty about the style in which she played it.

The Powers were cruel who brought these two persons together. Now in Paris, now at George Sand’s country place at Nohant, now in travel, Fate compelled them to play this fearful comedy, in which, at bottom, neither truly knew or comprehended the other. The woman remained a bel esprit, and the artist remained a dreamer. And in the midst of the comedy stands the ridiculous idyll of Majorca, in which these two persons live near each other, in a prison of their souls. The man delicate and pining, with agile limbs, slight hands, slight feet, silky-brown hair, transparent complexion, finely-curved nose, quiet smile, voice muffled “like a creeper whose calyx rocks on the delicate stem, dressed in wonderful colours, but of such airy texture that it tears at the slightest motion.” The woman, with an ideal Greek countenance on a somewhat thick-set body; a face that might seem to have come down from earlier ages, as Heine describes it, but softened by a surprising gentleness—Musset’s “femme à l’œil sombre.” They sit in the midst of the cypresses, oranges, and myrtles in the deserted monastery of Valdemosa with its chapels, churches, carved statues, and moss-grown stonework. In the evening the populace come out and dance ghostlike boleros with castanets, or at other times the wind howls as if possessed and the rain falls without intermission. Eating is impossible; ships cannot come through the storm. A Pleyel piano, brought there with difficulty, stands in the deserted halls, and Chopin sits at it and shivers. He longs for home; and she is soon compelled to recognise that nothing increased his chest-complaint so much as this winter in Majorca, which she had aided him in planning.

This winter in Majorca was that of 1838 and 1839. It has long been believed that it gave rise to Chopin’s Preludes. Some have even fancied they recognised in the dropping motives of some of them, especially the E minor, the B minor, and the D flat major, the effect of the constant rain of Majorca. The truth is that a large part of the Preludes were written, or half written, before this, and that only the last touches were given to them in Majorca. Nay, it is even possible that the mighty and fiery A major Polonaise was conceived and finished under the gloomy sky of Majorca. Dates are difficult to obtain, and also of very little importance. Chopin writes his works so entirely from the heart that they have very little dependence on the moment of their composition. The single case of an impulse of this kind would seem to be the news of the sack of Warsaw, upon which he is said to have written the stormy C minor Étude. Poetic influences, also, Polish or French, move him only as it were on the circumference. He is a delicately emotional nature, but far from a literary one.

Chopin’s habit of conceiving his pieces as great wholes is precisely what renders an analysis of his works impossible. Chopin, with all the charms we know so well, with all his wide embracing harmonies, his spirited voice-outlines, is but one, and one whole: and this single Chopin takes now one, now another, isolated form, in which, from the original motives, ever fresh creations are fused together. In every piece he is entirely present. There are, it is true, a few weaker pieces of his youth; and Fontana has published a large stock from his remains (these are numbered from Op. 66 on)—a thing to which he would have objected; he hated this stirring of dead bones. But these pieces have now vanished even from the practising repertoire of the following generations. Certain lines can always be drawn over his general work. We see him, at first, plainly dominated by his only true forerunner, Hummel, for whom he felt a passionate admiration, and whose method of execution he has only further enlarged; so that in Chopin’s daintiest colourations a keen observer can detect the relics of the old “manieren” and ornamental flourishes. The E flat major Rondo, the Concert-Polonaise, and, above all, the two Concertos in E minor and F minor, show clearly the influence of Hummel, notably in their jerky insertion of étude-like murmuring motives, their simply broken accompaniment to the cantilena, their brilliant effects in the high registers, their easy drawing-room phrases, and their surprisingly Mozart-like charm in melodic line. But the concertos, the most fairy-like in the whole range of that class of literature, already point to regions so far out of the reach of Hummel that they cannot be exhaustively summed up under that category. Scarcely to be separated chronologically from them are the pure commencements of the genuine art of Chopin, which is clearly visible in the first Mazurkas, and stretches far into the forties. Even those remarkable spirited variations in B flat minor, dated 1833, on an operatic theme of Herold, in which Chopin seemed to make a concession to fashion, are not removed a hair’s breadth from the distinction of his best style. In 1840, a year so fruitful for Schumann also, appeared Op. 35 to 50. Chopin was thirty-one, the age at which Schubert died. At last a certain later style has been marked off; restrained, contrapuntal, and yet unfettered. His most brightly-coloured examples he gave in the wildly poetical Barcarolle, the spiritual B major Nocturne, and the full-bodied Fantasia-Polonaise.

Chopin’s work shows but few departures from his regular lines. Of these we may mention the beautiful pasticcio of the F minor Fantasia, which should be played with a sort of extempore laxity; the Barcarolle; the Tarantelle; the Bolero; and the refined Berceuse, in which, over the uniform accompaniment, a splendid succession of motives ascends or descends; which form an epitome of Chopin’s “manieren,” as the Goldberg Variations were of Bach’s, the Diabelli of Beethoven’s, or the C sharp minor of Schumann’s. Apart from these his pieces fall into symmetrical groups, each of which has its own pronounced character.

His sonatas remain most strange to us; they are sonatas in the strict sense as little as the other sonatas by the Romantics. Chopin cares so little for form that he avoids the recurrence to the first theme. The whole falls into fragments: the B flat minor has its wild first theme and its dainty second; the capricious Scherzo, the Funeral March, which, alas! has become so popular (it was introduced into the Sonata only by an afterthought), and the spirited unisono storm of the last Presto, right on to the fortissimo concluding bar. But from the B minor Sonata, the sultry Largo, and the last movement, a kind of giant boating-piece, strike us as most remarkable.

Chopin finds his true form in the Ballades and Scherzi. This is the extempore form, which even in the Impromptus has for long not been so unfettered. The dividing lines of the sections are drawn from free invention, and the thought is constrained by no scheme. An artistic order introduces the rhythm of the arrangement with which the moment would have been obliged to dispense. It is naturalism lifted into the sphere of discrete art.

The improvised form is shown in the Preludes still more purely, but with less pretension. They are a succession of musical aphorisms, from the sketch to the finished piece, running through the gamut of all forms.

In these Ballades, Scherzi and Preludes, we reach again one of those solitary peaks of piano literature in which improvisatorial invention and artistic construction meet again in a higher unity.

The Études crown the efforts of this period, to bring technique and tune into the friendly relation peculiar to them. While we admire their mechanical value in point of polyrhythmical effects, wide stretches, double trills, independence of the left hand, airy piano-effects, freedom of the wrist, and quickness of finger-change, we praise their poetry, the grace of the C major or the magic of the A flat major, the solemnity of the C sharp minor, or the intoxication of the G flat major, the Titanic force of the C minor, or the melancholy of the E flat minor.

The Nocturnes—with the silken web of the D flat major in their midst—are the high songs of melody which Chopin nowhere else has framed with such entrancing aspiration or such broad exclamatory sighs. But the dances are the high songs of rhythm, to which never yet was so intellectual a homage paid. The Polonaises have the galant and knightly features of the old Polish nobility; and Chopin’s head rears itself in them more proudly than one would have expected from his feminine nature. But the Mazurkas are bourgeois little joys, half bathed in sorrow, half crushing their pain in the jubilation of the rhythm—an unparalleled series of intellectual inspirations. In the Waltzes we have only a higher kind of Mazurkas, with less of the national spirit, like Poles in the Parisian drawing-room. The slow Waltz in A minor, not without reason, was dearest to Chopin’s own heart.

Chopin’s playing was the rapture of his contemporaries. All agree that his individuality could only be made intelligible by himself. How long did Moscheles torment himself with the remarkable harmonic transitions which he found in Chopin’s compositions! But when he heard the master himself, all doubt vanished; what had seemed violent now became self-intelligible. Chopin’s playing was dainty and airy; his fingers seemed to glide sideways, as if all technique were a glissando; even the Forte was in him not an absolute but a relative forte—relative, that is, to the gentle voice of the rest; and it rises, the older he grew, so much the less by force than by a subtle play of touch. All execution has made way for a certain free extempore poesy; the rubato softens the harshness of bar-accent. Liszt’s definition of the rubato is well known—“You see that tree; its leaves move to and fro in the wind and follow the gentlest motion of the air; but its trunk stands there, immovable in its form.” Chopin seems never to have carried the rubato so far that this trunk itself would have stirred. Once already had a player arisen who cultivated this graceful and airy kind of execution. Field, a Scot by birth, Clementi’s pupil, a pale and dreamy man, had anticipated the delicate breadth of Chopin’s touch; and the world had been enraptured with his melancholy renderings by means of apparently motionless hands. Alongside of not very important sonatas, concertos, and rondos, he had published a series of song-like pieces, which he called “Nocturnes,” and in which he put to special use his longing melodies, his dreamy portamenti, his rose-chains of airy colourations. Compared with Chopin’s Nocturnes, these must necessarily appear pale and even monotonous; but in his whole essence, in the form of his pieces, and the delicacy of his touch, Field was a prelude to Chopin—as Dussek or Louis Ferdinand were in their kind. When Chopin once played before Alexander Klengel, Clementi’s pupil, the latter was strongly reminded of Field. And when Chopin, after his arrival in Paris, conceived the idea of taking further lessons under Kalkbrenner, whose delicate playing he admired above everything, the latter likewise thought that the style reminded him of Cramer, but the playing of Field. “Were you Field’s pupil?” he asked. Chopin’s true teacher, the forgotten Elsner of Warsaw, had had no share in it. Chopin had formed his own playing, as he formed his own style. In early years he had a mania for width of stretch, and even invented a device for stretching the fingers. The experiment was fortunately more successful than Schumann’s attempt to increase the independence of the fingers by means of a sling. The difference is noteworthy: Chopin aimed at a richer impression of voluptuous fullness in the chords; Schumann at increased independence of part playing.

Chopin, as a sensitive artist, laid special stress on the kind of instrument he used. In his youth he would only willingly play on Graf’s pianos; in Paris only on those of Pleyel, whose silvern muffled tone was specially attractive to him. In those of Erard he thought the tone too insistent. “If I am in a bad humour I play an Erard, and easily find there the tone ready-made. But if I am in the humour, and strong enough to make my own tone, I use a Pleyel.” The fingering, also, he regulates for himself. For the sake of a better execution he never objects to put his thumb on a black key in suitable places, or to glide with one finger over two keys, or to let longer fingers pass over the shorter without using the thumb. In his Études he has expressly written marks for many such naturalistic fingerings.