Despite his idiomatic treatment of the piano it must be remembered that Chopin under Sontag’s and Paganini’s influence imitated both voice and violin on the keyboard.  His lyricism is most human, while the portamento, the slides, trills and indescribably subtle turns—­are they not of the violin?  Wagner said to Mr. Dannreuther—­see Finck’s “Wagner and his Works”—­that “Mozart’s music and Mozart’s orchestra are a perfect match; an equally perfect balance exists between Palestrina’s choir and Palestrina’s counterpoint, and I find a similar correspondence between Chopin’s piano and some of his Etudes and Preludes—­I do not care for the Ladies’ Chopin; there is too much of the Parisian salon in that, but he has given us many things which are above the salon.”  Which latter statement is slightly condescending.  Recollect, however, Chopin’s calm depreciation of Schumann.  Mr. John F. Runciman, the English critic, asserts that “Chopin thought in terms of the piano, and only the piano.  So when we see Chopin’s orchestral music or Wagner’s music for the piano we realize that neither is talking his native tongue—­the tongue which nature fitted him to speak.”  Speaking of “Chopin and the Sick Men” Mr. Runciman is most pertinent: 

“These inheritors of rickets and exhausted physical frames made some of the most wonderful music of the century for us.  Schubert was the most wonderful of them all, but Chopin runs him very close. ...  He wrote less, far less than Schubert wrote; but, for the quantity he did write, its finish is miraculous.  It may be feverish, merely mournful, cadavre, or tranquil, and entirely beautiful; but there is not a phrase that is not polished as far as a phrase will bear polishing.  It is marvellous music; but, all the same, it is sick, unhealthy music.”

“Liszt’s estimate of the technical importance of Chopin’s works,” writes Mr. W.J.  Henderson, “is not too large.  It was Chopin who systematized the art of pedalling and showed us how to use both pedals in combination to produce those wonderful effects of color which are so necessary in the performance of his music. ...  The harmonic schemes of the simplest of Chopin’s works are marvels of originality and musical loveliness, and I make bold to say that his treatment of the passing note did much toward showing later writers how to produce the restless and endless complexity of the harmony in contemporaneous orchestral music.”

Heinrich Pudor in his strictures on German music is hardly complimentary to Chopin:  “Wagner is a thorough-going decadent, an off-shoot, an epigonus, not a progonus.  His cheeks are hollow and pale—­but the Germans have the full red cheeks.  Equally decadent is Liszt.  Liszt is a Hungarian and the Hungarians are confessedly a completely disorganized, self-outlived, dying people.  No less decadent is Chopin, whose figure comes before one as flesh without bones, this morbid, womanly, womanish, slip-slop, powerless, sickly, bleached, sweet-caramel Pole!” This has a ring of Nietzsche—­Nietzsche who boasted of his Polish origin.