Chopin [Madame Dubois informed me] made his pupils begin with the B major scale, very slowly, without stiffness.  Suppleness was his great object.  He repeated, without ceasing, during the lesson:  “Easily, easily” [facilement, facilement].  Stiffness exasperated him.

How much stiffness and jerkiness exasperated him may be judged from what Madame Zaleska related to M. Kleczynski.  A pupil having played somewhat carelessly the arpeggio at the beginning of the first study (in A flat major) of the second book of Clementi’s Preludes et Exercices, the master jumped from his chair and exclaimed:  “What is that?  Has a dog been barking?” [Qu’est-ce?  Est-ce un chien qui vient d’aboyer?] The rudeness of this exclamation will, no doubt, surprise.  But polite as Chopin generally was, irritation often got the better of him, more especially in later years when bad health troubled him.  Whether he ever went the length of throwing the music from the desk and breaking chairs, as Karasowski says, I do not know and have not heard confirmed by any pupil.  Madame Rubio, however, informed me that Chopin was very irritable, and when teaching amateurs used to have always a packet of pencils about him which, to vent his anger, he silently broke into bits.  Gutmann told me that in the early stages of his discipleship Chopin sometimes got very angry, and stormed and raged dreadfully; but immediately was kind and tried to soothe his pupil when he saw him distressed and weeping.

To be sure [writes Mikuli], Chopin made great demands on the talent and diligence of the pupil.  Consequently, there were often des lecons orageuses, as it was called in the school idiom, and many a beautiful eye left the high altar of the Cite d’Orleans, Rue St. Lazare, bedewed with tears, without, on that account, ever bearing the dearly-beloved master the least grudge.  For was not the severity which was not easily satisfied with anything, the feverish vehemence with which the master wished to raise his disciples to his own stand-point, the ceaseless repetition of a passage till it was understood, a guarantee that he had at heart the progress of the pupil?  A holy artistic zeal burnt in him then, every word from his lips was incentive and inspiring.  Single lessons often lasted literally for hours at a stretch, till exhaustion overcame master and pupil.

Indeed, the pupils were so far from bearing their master the least grudge that, to use M. Marmontel’s words, they had more for him than admiration:  a veritable idolatry.  But it is time that after this excursion—­which hardly calls for an excuse—­we return to the more important part of our subject, the master’s method of teaching.