While Chopin was strong and healthy, as during the first years of his residence in Paris, he used to play on an Erard piano; but after his friend Camille Pleyel had made him a present of one of his splendid instruments, remarkable for their metallic ring and very light touch, he would play on no other maker’s.

If he was engaged for a soiree at the house of one of his Polish or French friends, he would often send his own instrument, if there did not happen to be a Pleyel in the house.

Chopin was very partial to [affectionnait] Pleyel’s pianos, particularly on account of their silvery and somewhat veiled sonority, and of the easy touch which permitted him to draw from them sounds which one might have believed to belong to those harmonicas of which romantic Germany has kept the monopoly, and which her ancient masters constructed so ingeniously, marrying crystal to water.

Chopin himself said:—­

When I am indisposed, I play on one of Erard’s pianos and there I easily find a ready-made tone.  But when I feel in the right mood and strong enough to find my own tone for myself, I must have one of Pleyel’s pianos.

From the fact that Chopin played during his visit to Great Britain in 1848 at public concerts as well as at private parties on instruments of Broadwood’s, we may conclude that he also appreciated the pianos of this firm.  In a letter dated London, 48, Dover Street, May 6, 1848, he writes to Gutmann:  “Erard a ete charmant, il m’a fait poser un piano.  J’ai un de Broadwood et un de Pleyel, ce qui fait 3, et je ne trouve pas encore le temps pour les jouer.”  And in a letter dated Edinburgh, August 6, and Calder House, August 11, he writes to Franchomme:  “I have a Broadwood piano in my room, and the Pleyel of Miss Stirling in the salon.”

Here, I think, will be the fittest place to record what I have learnt regarding Chopin’s musical taste and opinions on music and musicians, and what will perhaps illustrate better than any other part of this book the character of the man and artist.  His opinions of composers and musical works show that he had in a high degree les vices de ses qualites.  The delicacy of his constitution and the super-refinement of his breeding, which put within his reach the inimitable beauties of subtlest tenderness and grace that distinguish his compositions and distinguished his playing, were disqualifications as well as qualifications.  “Every kind of uncouth roughness [toutes les rudesses sauvages] inspired him with aversion,” says Liszt.  “In music as in literature and in every-day life everything which bordered on melodrama was torture to him.”  In short, Chopin was an aristocrat with all the exclusiveness of an aristocrat.

The inability of men of genius to appreciate the merit of one or the other of their great predecessors and more especially of their contemporaries has often been commented on and wondered at, but I doubt very much whether a musician could be instanced whose sympathies were narrower than those of Chopin.  Besides being biographically important, the record of the master’s likings and dislikings will teach a useful lesson to the critic and furnish some curious material for the psychological student.