However great his admiration for the works of Beethoven might be, certain parts of them seemed to him too rudely fashioned.  Their structure was too athletic to please him; their wraths seemed to him too violent [leurs courroux lui semblaient trop rugissants].  He held that in them passion too closely approaches cataclysm; the lion’s marrow which is found in every member of his phrases was in his opinion a too substantial matter, and the seraphic accents, the Raphaelesque profiles, which appear in the midst of the powerful creations of this genius, became at times almost painful to him in so violent a contrast.

I am able to illustrate this most excellent general description by some examples.  Chopin said that Beethoven raised him one moment up to the heavens and the next moment precipitated him to the earth, nay, into the very mire.  Such a fall Chopin experienced always at the commencement of the last movement of the C minor Symphony.  Gutmann, who informed me of this, added that pieces such as the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata (C sharp minor) were most highly appreciated by his master.  One day when Mr. Halle played to Chopin one of the three Sonatas, Op. 31 (I am not sure which it was), the latter remarked that he had formerly thought the last movement vulgar.  From this Mr. Halle naturally concluded that Chopin could not have studied the works of Beethoven thoroughly.  This conjecture is confirmed by what we learn from Lenz, who in 1842 saw a good deal of Chopin, and thanks to his Boswellian inquisitiveness, persistence, and forwardness, made himself acquainted with a number of interesting facts.  Lenz and Chopin spoke a great deal about Beethoven after that visit to the Russian ladies mentioned in a foregoing part of this chapter.  They had never spoken of the great master before.  Lenz says of Chopin:—­

He did not take a very serious interest in Beethoven; he knew only his principal compositions, the last works not at all.  This was in the Paris air!  People knew the symphonies, the quartets of the middle period but little, the last ones not at all.

Chopin, on being told by Lenz that Beethoven had in the F minor Quartet anticipated Mendelssohn, Schumann, and him; and that the scherzo prepared the way for his mazurka-fantasias, said:  “Bring me this quartet, I do not know it.”  According to Mikuli Chopin was a regular frequenter of the concerts of the Societe des Concerts du Conservatoire and of the Alard, Franchomme, &c., quartet party.  But one of the most distinguished musicians living in Paris, who knew Chopin’s opinion of Beethoven, suspects that the music was for him not the greatest attraction of the Conservatoire concerts, that in fact, like most of those who went there, he considered them a fashionable resort.  True or not, the suspicion is undeniably significant.  “But Mendelssohn,” the reader will say, “surely Chopin must have admired and felt in sympathy with this sweet-voiced,