The Rondo for two pianos, this orphan child, has found a step- father in Fontana (you may perhaps have seen him at our house, he attends the university); he studied it for more than a month, but then he did learn it, and not long ago we tried how it would sound at Buchholtz’s.

Alexander Rembielinski, described as a brilliant pianist and a composer in the style of Fesca, who returned from Paris to Warsaw and died young, is said to have been a friend of Chopin’s.  Better musicians than Fontana, although less generally known in the western part of Europe, are Joseph Nowakowski and Thomas Nidecki.  Chopin, by some years their junior, had intercourse with them during his residence in Poland as well as afterwards abroad.  It does not appear that Chopin had what can rightly be called intimate friends among the young Polish musicians.  If we may believe the writer of an article in Sowinski’s Dictionary, there was one exception.  He tells us that the talented Ignaz Felix Dobrzynski was a fellow-pupil of Chopin’s, taking like him private lessons from Elsner.  Dobrzynski came to Warsaw in 1825, and took altogether thirty lessons.

Working together under the same master, having the same manner of seeing and feeling, Frederick Chopin and I.F.  Dobrzynski became united in a close friendship.  The same aims, the same artistic tendency to seek the unknown, characterised their efforts.  They communicated to each other their ideas and impressions, followed different routes to arrive at the same goal.

This unison of kindred minds is so beautiful that one cannot but wish it to have been a fact.  Still, I must not hide the circumstance that neither Liszt nor Karasowski mentions Dobrzynski as one of Chopin’s friends, and the even more significant circumstance that he is only mentioned twice and en passant in Chopin’s letters.  All this, however, does not necessarily nullify the lexicographer’s statements, and until contradictory evidence is forthcoming we may hold fast by so pleasing and ennobling a creed.

The most intimate of Chopin’s early friends, indeed, of all his friends—­perhaps the only ones that can be called his bosom friends—­have still to be named, Titus Woyciechowski and John Matuszynski.  It was to them that Chopin wrote his most interesting and self-revealing letters.  We shall meet them and hear of them often in the course of this narrative, for their friendship with the musician was severed only by death.  It will therefore suffice to say here that Titus Woyciechowski, who had been Chopin’s school-fellow, lived, at the period of the latter’s life we have now reached, on his family estates, and that John Matuszynski was then studying medicine in Warsaw.