He is one of the Viennese artists with whom I keep up a really friendly and intimate intercourse.  He plays like a second Paganini, but a rejuvenated one, who will perhaps in time surpass the first.  I should not believe it myself if I had not heard him so often....Slavik fascinates the listener and brings tears into his eyes.

Shortly after falling in with Slavik, Chopin met Merk, probably at the house of the publisher Mechetti, and on January 1, 1831, he announces to his friend in Warsaw with unmistakable pride that “Merk, the first violoncellist in Vienna,” has promised him a visit.  Chopin desired very much to become acquainted with him because he thought that Merk, Slavik, and himself would form a capital trio.  The violoncellist was considerably older than either pianist or violinist, being born in 1795.  Merk began his musical career as a violinist, but being badly bitten in the arm by a big dog, and disabled thereby to hold the violin in its proper position (this is what Fetis relates), he devoted himself to the violoncello, and with such success as to become the first solo player in Vienna.  At the time we are speaking of he was a member of the Imperial Orchestra and a professor at the Conservatorium.  He often gave concerts with Mayseder, and was called the Mayseder of the violoncello.  Chopin, on hearing him at a soiree of the well-known autograph collector Fuchs, writes home:—­

Limmer, one of the better artists here in Vienna, produced some of his compositions for four violoncelli.  Merk, by his expressive playing, made them, as usual, more beautiful than they really are.  People stayed again till midnight, for Merk took a fancy to play with me his variations.  He told me that he liked to play with me, and it is always a great treat to me to play with him.  I think we look well together.  He is the first violoncellist whom I really admire.

Of Chopin’s intercourse with the third of the “exceedingly interesting acquaintances “whom he mentions by name, we get no particulars in his letters.  Still, Carl Maria von Bocklet, for whom Beethoven wrote three letters of recommendation, who was an intimate friend of Schubert’s, and whose interpretations of classical works and power of improvisation gave him one of the foremost places among the pianists of the day, cannot have been without influence on Chopin.  Bocklet, better than any other pianist then living in Vienna, could bring the young Pole into closer communication with the German masters of the preceding generation; he could, as it were, transmit to him some of the spirit that animated Beethoven, Schubert, and Weber.  The absence of allusions to Bocklet in Chopin’s letters does not, however, prove that he never made any, for the extant letters are only a small portion of those he actually wrote, many of them having in the perturbed state of Poland never reached their destination, others having been burnt by his parents for fear of the Russian police, and some, no doubt, having been lost through carelessness or indifference.