Thalberg plays famously, but he is not my man.  He is younger than I, pleases the ladies very much, makes pot-pourris on “La Muette” ["Masaniello"], plays the forte and piano with the pedal, but not with the hand, takes tenths as easily as I do octaves, and wears studs with diamonds.  Moscheles does not at all astonish him; therefore it is no wonder that only the tuttis of my concerto have pleased him.  He, too, writes concertos.

Chopin was endowed with a considerable power of sarcasm, and was fond of cultivating and exercising it.  This portraiture of his brother-artist is not a bad specimen of its kind, although we shall meet with better ones.

Another, but as yet unfledged, celebrity was at that time living in Vienna, prosecuting his studies under Czerny—­namely, Theodor Dohler.  Chopin, who went to hear him play some compositions of his master’s at the theatre, does not allude to him again after the concert; but if he foresaw what a position as a pianist and composer he himself was destined to occupy, he could not suspect that this lad of seventeen would some day be held up to the Parisian public by a hostile clique as a rival equalling and even surpassing his peculiar excellences.  By the way, the notion of anyone playing compositions of Czerny’s at a concert cannot but strangely tickle the fancy of a musician who has the privilege of living in the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Besides the young pianists with a great future before them Chopin came also in contact with aging pianists with a great past behind them.  Hummel, accompanied by his son, called on him in the latter part of December, 1830, and was extraordinarily polite.  In April, 1831, the two pianists, the setting and the rising star, were together at the villa of Dr. Malfatti.  Chopin informed his master, Elsner, for whose masses he was in quest of a publisher, that Haslinger was publishing the last mass of Hummel, and added:- -

For he now lives only by and for Hummel.  It is rumoured that the last compositions of Hummel do not sell well, and yet he is said to have paid a high price for them.  Therefore he now lays all MSS. aside, and prints only Strauss’s waltzes.

Unfortunately there is not a word which betrays Chopin’s opinion of Hummel’s playing and compositions.  We are more fortunate in the case of another celebrity, one, however, of a much lower order.  In one of the prosaic intervals, of the sentimental rhapsody, indited on December 25, 1830, there occur the following remarks:—­

The pianist Aloys Schmitt of Frankfort-on-the-Main, famous for his excellent studies, is at present here; he is a man above forty.  I have made his acquaintance; he promised to visit me.  He intends to give a concert here, and one must admit that he is a clever musician.  I think we shall understand each other with regard to music.

Having looked at this picture, let the reader look also at this other, dashed off a month later in a letter to Elsner:—­