whole.”  He played the octaves in the A flat Polonaise with infinite ease but pianissimo.  Now where is the “tradition” when confronted by the mighty crashing of Rosenthal in this particular part of the Polonaise?  Of Karl Tausig, Weitzmann said that “he relieved the romantically sentimental Chopin of his Weltschmerz and showed him in his pristine creative vigor and wealth of imagination.”  In Chopin’s music there are many pianists, many styles and all are correct if they are poetically musical, logical and individually sincere.  Of his rubato I treat in the chapter devoted to the Mazurkas, making also an attempt to define the “zal” of his playing and music.

When Chopin was strong he used a Pleyel piano, when he was ill an Erard—­a nice fable of Liszt’s!  He said that he liked the Erard but he really preferred the Pleyel with its veiled sonority.  What could not he have accomplished with the modern grand piano?  In the artist’s room of the Maison Pleyel there stands the piano at which Chopin composed the Preludes, the G minor nocturne, the Funeral March, the three supplementary fitudes, the A minor Mazurka, the Tarantelle, the F minor Fantasie and the B minor Scherzo.  A brass tablet on the inside lid notes this.  The piano is still in good condition as regards tone and action.

Mikuli asserted that Chopin brought out an “immense” tone in cantabiles.  He had not a small tone, but it was not the orchestral tone of our day.  Indeed how could it be, with the light action and tone of the French pianos built in the first half of the century?  After all it was quality, not quantity that Chopin sought.  Each one of his ten fingers was a delicately differentiated voice, and these ten voices could sing at times like the morning stars.

Rubinstein declared that all the pedal marks are wrong in Chopin.  I doubt if any edition can ever give them as they should be, for here again the individual equation comes into play.  Apart from certain fundamental rules for managing the pedals, no pedagogic regulations should ever be made for the more refined nuanciren.

The portraits of Chopin differ widely.  There is the Ary Scheffer, the Vigneron—­praised by Mathias—­the Bovy medallion, the Duval drawing, and the head by Kwiatowski.  Delacroix tried his powerful hand at transfixing in oil the fleeting expressions of Chopin.  Felix Barrias, Franz Winterhalter, and Albert Graefle are others who tried with more or less success.  Anthony Kolberg painted Chopin in 1848-49.  Kleczynski reproduces it; it is mature in expression.  The Clesinger head I have seen at Pere la Chaise.  It is mediocre and lifeless.  Kwiatowski has caught some of the Chopin spirit in the etching that may be found in volume one of Niecks’ biography.  The Winterhalter portrait in Mr. Hadow’s volume is too Hebraic, and the Graefle is a trifle ghastly.  It is the dead Chopin, but the nose is that of a predaceous bird, painfully aquiline.  The “Echo Muzyczne” Warsaw, of October 1899—­ in Polish “17