The portrait of Clementi is expressive of a serene, impassive character. The forehead is high, broad, and massive; the nose well-chiselled and somewhat broadly curved at the nostrils; the mouth large, firm, and well set; the chin grandly sculptured; while the eyes are large and round, with introspective gaze. A distinctly Wordsworthian type of face.

CHOPIN

1810-1849

FREDERIC FRANÇOIS CHOPIN ex

pressed in music the yearning after the ideal, the artistic soul's passion for the beautiful, its tender longing and regret, its feeling for the littleness of life, and its consciousness of the exhausting sensibilities of man's deeper nature, with its tendency to woe and despair, and its impotence to command or secure joy and happiness on earth. There is the wail of the pessimist in such music; indeed, this wail or undertone is to be found, alas! in all the highest expressions of the human intellect, from Job to David and Solomon, and from these to Goethe and Byron; but there is also ideal beauty and grace, and exquisite ethereal fancy, in Chopin's music. These qualities are so

mixed and blended as to constitute the outward sign and symbol of a rare genius which, something like that of Shelley in poetry, finds

its power in delicacy of perception and intensity of feeling.1

Just as his power as a composer is alone and individual, Chopin's place as a virtuoso is unique and exceptional. As the interpreter of his own music he is admitted by his contemporaries to have been unrivalled. His style as a player was marked by fineness and intuitive delicacy, which is the natural complement of his genius as a creator and composer. But he shrank instinctively from the concert audience; it was in small societies of the select and chosen few that he could only do justice to his power of compelling the spirit of the pianoforte to render up its virtue. He was the poet-player, whose dæmon lives again in the rhythm, surge, and cadence of his own music as it re-echoes from his own lips. In this sense he was not the orator or the actor at the piano, but the creatorsinger with the strings of his lyre quivering with the throes of remembered inspiration and dream and passion. And for this subtle mood an audience was required at once discreet and receptive. M. Chouquet, referring to the quiet salon concerts in Paris, speaks of 'the fiery playing of Liszt and the ineffable poetry of

1 Chopin's life and his place as a composer are dealt with by the author in the preceding volume of this series.

Chopin's style.' Again, he points to Liszt as the true prototype of the virtuoso, aiming at effect and posing as the Paganini of the piano, and remarks that Chopin never thought of his audience, but listened 'only to the inner voices'; but, he adds, 'when the inspiration took hold of him he made the keyboard sing in an ineffable manner.' He was far too sensitive for the concert platform, and his refined and spirituel playing, he felt, was liable to be misunderstood. As Spenser is the poets' poet, so Chopin was the pianist of the musicians. He said to Liszt: 'I am not at all fit for giving concerts; the crowd intimidates me; I feel paralysed by its curious look, and the unknown. faces make me dumb. But you are destined for it for where you do not win your public, you have the power to overwhelm it.'2 Opposition, coldness, indifference, affected him as touch does the sensitive plant.

From a nature so finely constituted the public virtuoso cannot be evolved. Yet Chopin received a generous meed of applause from the public, and succeeded in leaving behind him impressions of a lasting character. His first appearance in Vienna occurred on August 11,

1 Chopin as a Man and a Musician, by Frederick Niecks, vol. i. p. 283.

2 Ibid.

1829. He played his variations on Là ci darem la mano-the piece being arranged for piano and orchestra—an improvisation, and a short ballet. Although, as he tells us, he 'played in a desperate mood,' his success was immediate and pronounced, the performer being called back several times, and the 'Bravos !' drowning the tuttis of the orchestra. A second concert was still more successful, and the critics of the Vienna journals paid tribute to his merit as a composer and a performer of high distinction, originality, and striking individual power. On his return to Warsaw he earns more fame as a performer; but he is evidently not quite understood by his compatriots, who regard the softness and delicacy of expression which he strives to elicit from the piano as due to want of force in the player or sounding tone in the instrument. At his last concert in Warsaw in 1830, the first Allegro from the Concerto in E minor was received with rapturous bursts of applause, and between the parts of the Adagio and Rondo the stage was thronged with congratulating friends. He played the Fantasia on Polish airs, which had hitherto failed to elicit the response he expected. This time it went home. This time,' he says, 'I understood myself, the orchestra understood me, and