The piano bard, the piano rhapsodist, the piano mind, the piano soul is Chopin. ...  Tragic, romantic, lyric, heroic, dramatic, fantastic, soulful, sweet, dreamy, brilliant, grand, simple; all possible expressions are found in his compositions and all are sung by him upon his instrument.

Chopin is dead only fifty years, but his fame has traversed the half century with ease, and bids fair to build securely in the loves of our great-grandchildren.  The six letters that comprise his name pursue every piano that is made.  Chopin and modern piano playing are inseparable, and it is a strain upon homely prophecy to predict a time when the two shall be put asunder.  Chopin was the greatest interpreter of Chopin, and following him came those giants of other days, Liszt, Tausig, and Rubinstein.

While he never had the pupils to mould as had Liszt, Chopin made some excellent piano artists.  They all had, or have—­the old guard dies bravely—­his tradition, but exactly what the Chopin tradition is no man may dare to say.  Anton Rubinstein, when I last heard him, played Chopin inimitably.  Never shall I forget the Ballades, the two Polonaises in F sharp minor and A flat major, the B flat minor Prelude, the A minor “Winter Wind” the two C minor studies, and the F minor Fantasie.  Yet the Chopin pupils, assembled in judgment at Paris when he gave his Historical Recitals, refused to accept him as an interpreter.  His touch was too rich and full, his tone too big.  Chopin did not care for Liszt’s reading of his music, though he trembled when he heard him thunder in the Eroica Polonaise.  I doubt if even Karl Tausig, impeccable artist, unapproachable Chopin player, would have pleased the composer.  Chopin played as his moods prompted, and his playing was the despair and delight of his hearers.  Rubinstein did all sorts of wonderful things with the coda of the Barcarolle—­such a page!—­but Sir Charles Halle said that it was “clever but not Chopinesque.”  Yet Halle heard Chopin at his last Paris concert, February, 1848, play the two forte passages in the Barcarolle “pianissimo and with all sorts of dynamic finesse.”  This is precisely what Rubinstein did, and his pianissimo was a whisper.  Von Bulow was too much of a martinet to reveal the poetic quality, though he appreciated Chopin on the intellectual side; his touch was not beautiful enough.  The Slavic and Magyar races are your only true Chopin interpreters.  Witness Liszt the magnificent, Rubinstein a passionate genius, Tausig who united in his person all the elements of greatness, Essipowa fascinating and feminine, the poetic Paderewski, de Pachmann the fantastic, subtle Joseffy, and Rosenthal a phenomenon.