Highest among all the composers, living and dead, Chopin esteemed Mozart.  Him he regarded as “the ideal type, the poet par excellence.”  It is related of Chopin—­with what truth I do not know—­that he never travelled without having either the score of “Don Giovanni” or that of the “Requiem” in his portmanteau.  Significant, although not founded on fact, is the story according to which he expressed the wish that the “Requiem” should be performed at his funeral service.  Nothing, however, shows his love for the great German master more unmistakably and more touchingly than the words which on his death-bed he addressed to his dear friends the Princess Czartoryska and M. Franchomme:  “You will play Mozart together, and I shall hear you.”  And why did Chopin regard Mozart as the ideal type, the poet par excellence?  Liszt answers:  “Because Mozart condescended more rarely than any other composer to cross the steps which separate refinement from vulgarity.”  But what no doubt more especially stirred sympathetic chords in the heart of Chopin, and inspired him with that loving admiration for the earlier master, was the sweetness, the grace, and the harmoniousness which in Mozart’s works reign supreme and undisturbed—­the unsurpassed and unsurpassable perfect loveliness and lovely perfection which result from a complete absence of everything that is harsh, hard, awkward, unhealthy, and eccentric.  And yet, says Liszt of Chopin:—­

His sybaritism of purity, his apprehension of what was commonplace, were such that even in “Don Giovanni,” even in this immortal chef-d’oeuvre, he discovered passages the presence of which we have heard him regret.  His worship of Mozart was not thereby diminished, but as it were saddened.

The composer who next to Mozart stood highest in Chopin’s esteem was Bach.  “It was difficult to say,” remarks Mikuli, “which of the two he loved most.”  Chopin not only, as has already been mentioned, had works of Bach on his writing-table at Valdemosa, corrected the Parisian edition for his own use, and prepared himself for his concerts by playing Bach, but also set his pupils to study the immortal cantor’s suites, partitas, and preludes and fugues.  Madame Dubois told me that at her last meeting with him (in 1848) he recommended her “de toujours travailler Bach,” adding that that was the best means of making progress.

Hummel, Field, and Moscheles were the pianoforte composers who seem to have given Chopin most satisfaction.  Mozart and Bach were his gods, but these were his friends.  Gutmann informed me that Chopin was particularly fond of Hummel; Liszt writes that Hummel was one of the composers Chopin played again and again with the greatest pleasure; and from Mikuli we learn that of Hummel’s compositions his master liked best the Fantasia, the Septet, and the Concertos.  Liszt’s statement that the Nocturnes of Field were regarded by Chopin as “insuffisants” seems to me disproved by unexceptionable evidence.