It might be remarked here that Beethoven, too, aroused a wondering and worshipping world without the aid of saxophone or ophicleide.  But it is needless cruelty to pick at Madame Sand’s criticisms.  She had no technical education, and so little appreciation of Chopin’s peculiar genius for the piano that she could write, “The day will come when his music will be arranged for orchestra without change of the piano score;” which is disaster-breeding nonsense.  We have sounded Chopin’s weakness when writing for any instrument but his own, when writing in any form but his own.

The E minor Concerto is dedicated to Frederick Kalkbrenner, the F minor to the Comtesse Deiphine Potocka.  The latter dedication demonstrates that he could forget his only “ideal” in the presence of the charming Potocka!  Ah! these vibratile and versatile Poles!

Robert Schumann, it is related, shook his head wearily when his early work was mentioned.  “Dreary stuff,” said the composer, whose critical sense did not fail him even in so personal a question.  What Chopin thought of his youthful music may be discovered in his scanty correspondence.  To suppose that the young Chopin sprang into the arena a fully equipped warrior is one of those nonsensical notions which gains currency among persons unfamiliar with the law of musical evolution.  Chopin’s musical ancestry is easily traced; as Poe had his Holley Chivers, Chopin had his Field.  The germs of his second period are all there; from op. 1 to opus 22 virtuosity for virtuosity’s sake is very evident.  Liszt has said that in every young artist there is the virtuoso fever, and Chopin being a pianist did not escape the fever of the footlights.  He was composing, too, at a time when piano music was well nigh strangled by excess of ornament, when acrobats were kings, when the Bach Fugue and Beethoven Sonata lurked neglected and dusty in the memories of the few.  Little wonder, then, we find this individual, youthful Pole, not timidly treading in the path of popular composition, but bravely carrying his banner, spangled, glittering and fanciful, and outstripping at their own game all the virtuosi of Europe.  His originality in this bejewelled work caused Hummel to admire and Kalkbrenner to wonder.  The supple fingers of the young man from Warsaw made quick work of existing technical difficulties.  He needs must invent some of his own, and when Schumann saw the pages of op. 2 he uttered his historical cry.  Today we wonder somewhat at his enthusiasm.  It is the old story—­a generation seeks to know, a generation comprehends and enjoys, and a generation discards.

Opus 1, a Rondo in C minor, dedicated to Madame de Linde, saw the light in 1825, but it was preceded by two polonaises, a set of variations, and two mazurkas in G and B flat major.  Schumann declared that Chopin’s first published work was his tenth, and that between op. 1 and 2 there lay two years and twenty works.  Be this as it may, one cannot help liking the C minor Rondo.  In the A flat section we detect traces of his F minor Concerto.  There is lightness, joy in creation, which contrast with the heavy, dour quality of the C minor Sonata, op. 4.  Loosely constructed, in a formal sense, and too exuberant for his strict confines, this op. 1 is remarkable, much more remarkable, than Schumann’s Abegg variations.