The day before yesterday, just after I had received your letter and was going to answer it, who should enter?—­Chopin.  This was a great pleasure.  We passed a very happy day together, in honour of which I made yesterday a holiday...I have a new ballade by Chopin.  It appears to me his genialischstes (not genialstes) work; and I told him that I liked it best of all.

[Footnote:  “Sein genialischstes (nicht genialstes) Werk.”  I take Schumann to mean that the ballade in question (the one in G minor) is Chopin’s most spirited, most daring work, but not his most genial—­i.e., the one fullest of genius.  Schumann’s remark, in a criticism of Op. 37, 38, and 42, that this ballade is the “wildest and most original” of Chopin’s compositions, confirms my conjecture.]

After a long meditative pause he said with great emphasis:  “I am glad of that, it is the one which I too like best.”  He played besides a number of new etudes, nocturnes, and mazurkas—­everything incomparable.  You would like him very much.  But Clara [Wieck] is greater as a virtuoso, and gives almost more meaning to his compositions than he himself.  Imagine the perfection, a mastery which seems to be quite unconscious of itself!

Besides the announcement of September 16, 1836, that Chopin had been a day in Leipzig, that he had brought with him among other things new “heavenly” etudes, nocturnes, mazurkas, and a new ballade, and that he played much and “very incomparably,” there occur in Schumann’s writings in the Neue Zeitschrift fur Musik unmistakable reminiscences of this visit of the Polish musician.  Thus, for instance, in a review of dance-music, which appeared in the following year, and to which he gave the fantastic form of a “Report to Jeanquirit in Augsburg of the editor’s last artistico-historical ball,” the writer relates a conversation he had with his partner Beda:—­

I turned the conversation adroitly on Chopin.  Scarcely had she heard the name than she for the first time fully looked at me with her large, kindly eyes.  “And you know him?” I answered in the affirmative.  “And you have heard him?” Her form became more and more sublime.  “And have heard him speak?” And when I told her that it was a never-to-be- forgotten picture to see him sitting at the piano like a dreaming seer, and how in listening to his playing one seemed to one’s self like the dream he created, and how he had the dreadful habit of passing, at the end of each piece, one finger quickly over the whizzing keyboard, as if to get rid of his dream by force, and how he had to take care of his delicate health—­she clung to me with ever-increasing timorous delight, and wished to know more and more about him.

Very interesting is Schumann’s description of how Chopin played some etudes from his Op. 25; it is to be found in another criticism of the same year (1837):—­