In listening to all these sounds, all these nuances, which follow each other, intermingle, separate, and reunite to arrive at one and the same goal, melody, do you not think you hear little fairy voices sighing under silver bells, or a rain of pearls falling on crystal tables?  The fingers of the pianist seem to multiply ad infinitum; it does not appear possible that only two hands can produce effects of rapidity so precise and so natural...

I shall now try to give the reader a clearer idea of what Chopin’s style of playing was like than any and all of the criticisms and descriptions I have hitherto quoted can have done.  And I do this not only in order to satisfy a natural curiosity, but also, and more especially, to furnish a guide for the better understanding and execution of the master’s works.  Some, seeing that no music reflects more clearly its author’s nature than that of Chopin, may think that it would be wiser to illustrate the style of playing by the style of composition, and not the style of composition by the style of playing.  Two reasons determine me to differ from them.  Our musical notation is an inadequate exponent of the conceptions of the great masters—­visible signs cannot express the subtle shades of the emotional language; and the capabilities of Chopin the composer and of Chopin the executant were by no means coextensive—­we cannot draw conclusions as to the character of his playing from the character of his Polonaises in A major (Op. 40) and in A flat (Op. 53), and certain movements of the Sonata in B flat minor (Op. 35).  The information contained in the following remarks is derived partly from printed publications, partly from private letters and conversations; nothing is admitted which does not proceed from Chopin’s pupils, friends, and such persons as have frequently heard him.

What struck everyone who had the good fortune to hear Chopin was the fact that he was a pianist sui generis.  Moscheles calls him an unicum; Mendelssohn describes him as “radically original” (Gruneigentumlich); Meyerbeer said of him that he knew no pianist, no composer for the piano, like him; and thus I could go on quoting ad infinitum.  A writer in the “Gazette musicale” (of the year 1835, I think), who, although he places at the head of his article side by side the names of Liszt, Hiller, Chopin, and--Bertini, proved himself in the characterisation of these pianists a man of some insight, remarks of Chopin:  “Thought, style, conception, even the fingering, everything, in fact, appears individual, but of a communicative, expansive individuality, an individuality of which superficial organisations alone fail to recognise the magnetic influence.”  Chopin’s place among the great pianists of the second quarter of this century has been felicitously characterised by an anonymous contemporary:  Thalberg, he said, is a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a sibyl, and Doehler a pianist.