What concerned Chopin most at the commencement of his instruction [writes Mikuli] was to free the pupil from every stiffness and convulsive, cramped movement of the hand, and to give him thus the first condition of a beautiful style of playing, souplesse (suppleness), and with it independence of the fingers.  He taught indefatigably that the exercises in question were no mere mechanical ones, but called for the intelligence and the whole will of the pupil, on which account twenty and even forty thoughtless repetitions (up to this time the arcanum of so many schools) do no good at all, still less the practising during which, according to Kalkbrenner’s advice, one may occupy one’s self simultaneously with some kind of reading(!).

He feared above all [remarked Madame Dubois to me] the abrutissement of the pupils.  One day he heard me say that I practised six hours a day.  He became quite angry, and forbade me to practise more than three hours.  This was also the advice of Hummel in his pianoforte school.

To resume Mikuli’s narrative:—­

  Chopin treated very thoroughly the different kinds of touch,
  especially the full-toned [tonvolle] legato.

[Footnote:  Karasowski says that Chopin demanded absolutely from his pupils that they should practise the exercises, and especially the scales in major and minor, from piano to fortissimo, staccato as well as legato, and also with a change of accent, which was to be now on the second, now on the third, now on the fourth note.  Madame Dubois, on the other hand, is sure she was never told by her master to play the scales staccato.]

“As gymnastic helps he recommended the bending inward and outward of the wrist, the repeated touch from the wrist, the extending of the fingers, but all this with the earnest warning against over-fatigue.  He made his pupils play the scales with a full tone, as connectedly as possible, very slowly and only gradually advancing to a quicker tempo, and with metronomic evenness.  The passing of the thumb under the other fingers and the passing of the latter over the former was to be facilitated by a corresponding turning inward of the hand.  The scales with many black keys (B, F sharp, and D flat) were first studied, and last, as the most difficult, C major.  In the same sequence he took up Clementi’s Preludes et Exercices, a work which for its utility he esteemed very highly.”

[Footnote:  Kleczynski writes that whatever the degree of instruction was which Chopin’s pupils brought with them, they had all to play carefully besides the scales the second book of Clementi’s Preludes et Exercices, especially the first in A flat major.]

According to Chopin the evenness of the scales (also of the arpeggios) not merely depended on the utmost equal strengthening of all fingers by means of five-finger exercises and on a thumb