He tells all about the interview in a letter to Titus:  “Are you a pupil of Field’s?” was asked by Kalkbrenner, who remarked that Chopin had the style of Cramer and the touch of Field.  Not having a standard by which to gauge the new phenomenon, Kalkbrenner was forced to fall back on the playing of men he knew.  He then begged Chopin to study three years with him—­only three!—­but Elsner in an earnest letter dissuaded his pupil from making any experiments that might hurt his originality of style.  Chopin actually attended the class of Kalkbrenner but soon quit, for he had nothing to learn of the pompous, penurious pianist.  The Hiller story of how Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt and Heller teased this grouty old gentleman on the Boulevard des Italiens is capital reading, if not absolutely true.  Yet Chopin admired Kalkbrenner’s finished technique despite his platitudinous manner.  Heine said—­or rather quoted Koreff—­ that Kalkbrenner looked like a bonbon that had been in the mud.  Niecks thinks Chopin might have learned of Kalkbrenner on the mechanical side.  Chopin, in public, was modest about his attainments, looking upon himself as self-taught.  “I cannot create a new school, because I do not even know the old,” he said.  It is this very absence of scholasticism that is both the power and weakness of his music.  In reality his true technical ancestor was Hummel.

He played the E minor concerto first in Paris, February 26, 1832, and some smaller pieces.  Although Kalkbrenner, Baillot and others participated, Chopin was the hero of the evening.  The affair was a financial failure, the audience consisting mostly of distinguished and aristocratic Poles.  Mendelssohn, who disliked Kalkbrenner and was angered at his arrogance in asking Chopin to study with him, “applauded furiously.”  “After this,” Hiller writes, “nothing more was heard of Chopin’s lack of technique.”  The criticisms were favorable.  On May 20, 1832, Chopin appeared at a charity concert organized by Prince de la Moskowa.  He was lionized in society and he wrote to Titus that his heart beat in syncopation, so exciting was all this adulation, social excitement and rapid gait of living.  But he still sentimentalizes to Titus and wishes him in Paris.

A flirtation of no moment, with Francilla Pixis, the adopted daughter of Pixis the hunchback pianist—­cruelly mimicked by Chopin—­aroused the jealousy of the elder artist.  Chopin was delighted, for he was malicious in a dainty way.  “What do you think of this?” he writes. “I, a dangerous seducteur!” The Paris letters to his parents were unluckily destroyed, as Karasowski relates, by Russian soldiers in Warsaw, September 19, 1863, and with them were burned his portrait by Ary Scheffer and his first piano.  The loss of the letters is irremediable.  Karasowski who saw some of them says they were tinged with melancholy.  Despite his artistic success Chopin needed money and began to consider again his projected trip to America.  Luckily he met Prince Valentine Radziwill on the street, so it is said, and was persuaded to play at a Rothschild soiree.  From that moment his prospects brightened, for he secured paying pupils.  Niecks, the iconoclast, has run this story to earth and finds it built on airy, romantic foundations.  Liszt, Hiller, Franchomme and Sowinski never heard of it although it was a stock anecdote of Chopin.