of his pupils, he was by no means satisfied with a mere mechanical perfection.  He advised his pupils to undertake betimes thorough theoretical studies, recommending his friend, the composer and theorist Henri Reber as a teacher.  He advised them also to cultivate ensemble playing—­ trios, quartets, &c., if first-class partners could be had, otherwise pianoforte duets.  Most urgent, however, he was in his advice to them to hear good singing, and even to learn to sing.  To Madame Rubio he said:  “You must sing if you wish to play”; and made her take lessons in singing and hear much Italian opera—­ this last, the lady remarked, Chopin regarded as positively necessary for a pianoforte-player.  In this advice we recognise Chopin’s ideal of execution:  beauty of tone, intelligent phrasing, truthfulness and warmth of expression.  The sounds which he drew from the pianoforte were pure tone without the least admixture of anything that might be called noise.  “He never thumped,” was Gutmann’s remark to me.  Chopin, according to Mikuli, repeatedly said that when he heard bad phrasing it appeared to him as if some one recited, in a language he did not know, a speech laboriously memorised, not only neglecting to observe the right quantity of the syllables, but perhaps even making full stops in the middle of words.  “The badly-phrasing pseudo-musician,” he thought, “showed that music was not his mother-tongue, but something foreign, unintelligible to him,” and that, consequently, “like that reciter, he must altogether give up the idea of producing any effect on the auditor by his rendering.”  Chopin hated exaggeration and affectation.  His precept was:  “Play as you feel.”  But he hated the want of feeling as much as false feeling.  To a pupil whose playing gave evidence of nothing but the possession of fingers, he said emphatically, despairingly:  “METTEZ-Y DONc toute votre ame!” (Do put all your soul into it!)

[Footnote:  “In dynamical shading [im nuanciren],” says Mikuli, “he was exceedingly particular about a gradual increase and decrease of loudness.”  Karasowski writes:  “Exaggeration in accentuation was hateful to him, for, in his opinion, it took away the poesy from playing, and gave it a certain didactic pedantry.”]

On declamation, and rendering in general [writes Mikuli], he gave his pupils invaluable and significant instructions and hints, but, no doubt, effected more certain results by repeatedly playing not only single passages, but whole pieces, and this he did with a conscientiousness and enthusiasm that perhaps he hardly gave anyone an opportunity of hearing when he played in a concert-room.  Frequently the whole hour passed without the pupil having played more than a few bars, whilst Chopin, interrupting and correcting him on a Pleyel cottage piano (the pupil played always on an excellent grand piano; and it was enjoined upon him as a duty to practise only on first-class instruments), presented to him for his admiration and imitation the life-warm ideal of the highest beauty.

With regard to Chopin’s playing to his pupils we must keep in mind what was said in foot-note 12 on page 184.  On another point in the above quotation one of Madame Dubois’s communications to me throws some welcome light:—­