To the piano he confided all the conflicts that raged within him, all the courage and living hope that sustained him.  In giving tonal form to the deep things of the soul, which are universal in their essence and application, he embodied universal rather than merely individual emotional experiences, and thus unbared what was most sacred to himself without jarring on the innate reticence which made purely personal confidences impossible.  Although his mode of expression was peculiarly his own, he had received a strong impulse from the popular music of Poland.  As a child he had become familiar with the folk-songs and dances heard in the harvest-fields and at market and village festivals.  They were his earliest models; on them were builded his first themes.  As Bach glorified the melodies of the German people, so Chopin glorified those of the Poles.  The national tonality became to him a vehicle to be freighted with his own individual conceptions.

“I should like to be to my people what Uhland was to the Germans,” he once said to a friend.  He addressed himself to the heart of this people and immortalized its joys, sorrows and caprices by the force of his splendid art.  Those who have attempted to interpret him as the sentimental hero of minor moods, the tone-poet in whom the weakness of despair predominates, have missed the leaping flames, the vivid intensity and the heroic manliness permeated with genuine love of beauty that animated him.  True art softens the harshest accents of suffering by placing superior to it some elevating idea.  So in the most melancholy strains of his music one who heeds well may detect the presence of a lofty ideal that uplifts and strengthens the travailing soul.  It has been said of him that he had a sad heart but a joyful mind.

The two teachers of Chopin were Adalbert Zwyny, a Bohemian violinist, who taught the piano, and Joseph Elsner, a violinist, organist and theorist.  “From Zwyny and Elsner even the greatest dunce must learn something,” he is quoted as saying.  Neither of these men attempted to hamper his free growth by rigid technical restraints.  Their guidance left him master of his own genius, at liberty to “soar like the lark into the ethereal blue of the skies.”  He respected them both.  A revering affection was cherished by him for Elsner, to whom he owed his sense of personal responsibility to his art, his habits of serious study and his intimate acquaintance with Bach.

There is food for thought in the fact that this Prince Charming of the piano, whose magic touch awakened the Sleeping Beauty of the instrument of wood and wires, never had a lesson in his life from a mere piano specialist.  Liszt once said Chopin was the only pianist he ever knew that could play the violin on the piano.  If he could do so it was because he had harkened to the voice of the violin and resolved to show that the piano, too, could produce thrilling effects.  In the same way he had listened to the human voice, and determined that the song of his own instrument should be heard.  Those who give ear to the piano alone will never learn the secret of calling forth its supreme eloquence.