Part 18: Appendix IV - Contemporaries' Descriptions II (pp. 384-398)

Part 18 of chopin-pianist-and-teacher-as-seen-by-his-pupils (pp. 384-398).

Question this unit answers

How did non-pupil contemporaries — poets, novelists, salon hosts, and above all the professional music press across two decades and four countries — actually describe the sound and character of Chopin’s playing? This closing half of Appendix IV moves from literary witnesses (Heine, Balzac, Custine, Trémont) to a chronological dossier of press criticism running from Chopin’s Viennese debut (1829) to his final Scottish appearance (1848), so that the reader can see which observations recur independently and which belong to a single writer’s imagination.

The unit’s implicit argument is convergence: writers with no contact with each other, no shared vocabulary, and often no sympathy for one another’s aesthetics keep reporting the same three things — small volume of tone but exceptional quality of tone, refusal of virtuoso display, and a physical fragility that confined the real Chopin to intimate spaces.

Key terms

• Heinrich Heine (p. 384) — poet and Paris correspondent; three separate notices (1837, 1841, 1843), each ranking Chopin above Thalberg and Liszt on the grounds that he is “more a composer than a virtuoso.”
• Honoré de Balzac (pp. 384-385) — four passages, three from La Comédie humaine (Le Cousin Pons, L’Envers de l’histoire contemporaine, Ursule Mirouët) plus a letter to Mme Hanska of 28 May 1843.
• Marquis de Custine (p. 385) — travel writer and friend; two letters to Chopin himself, after the concerts of 26 April 1841 and 16 February 1848 (nn. 26-27).
• Baron de Trémont (pp. 385-386) — Louis-Philippe-Joseph Girod de Vienney (1779-1852), salon host and autograph collector; his manuscript notice, dated 1843 and 1849 in his own hand, survives in his Collection d’autographes at the Bibliothèque Nationale (n. 30). Source of the pianiste intime formulation.
• Auber (p. 386) — quoted by Trémont for the remark “vous me reposez du piano,” cross-referenced from p. 394 n. 15.
• irritabilité nerveuse (p. 386) — Trémont’s term for the quality in Chopin that “alone leads to the sublime.”
• Anonymous, Wiener Theaterzeitung, 20 August 1829 (pp. 386-388) — the earliest review in the dossier, on the Kärntnertor Theatre concert; sometimes attributed to Adolf Bäuerle (n. 31). Unusually, it lists faults as well as merits.
• Constructionen (p. 387) — the Viennese reviewer’s word for the beginnings of new musical lines, whose accent Chopin neglected.
• August Kahlert (p. 388) — Breslau critic, “Über Chopin’s Klavier-Kompositionen,” Der Gesellschafter, 1834; the most technical account in the appendix (finger independence, chromatic sixths, relation to Clementi).
• François-Joseph Fétis (p. 389) — Revue musicale, 3 March 1832, on the Pleyel concert of 26 February 1832; praises and faults the op. 11 Concerto and recommends Kalkbrenner’s tutelage.
• Anonymous, “Briefe aus Paris,” Neue Leipziger Zeitschrift für Musik, May 1834 (pp. 389-390) — hears Nocturnes and Etudes; sets Chopin explicitly against Liszt.
• Anonymous, Le Pianiste, 5 June 1835 (p. 390) — source of the ripe / green metaphor for tone, itself borrowed from “one of our most spiritual artists.”
• Anton Schindler (pp. 390-391) — Beethoven’s famulus and first biographer, writing on Parisian musical life under Louis-Philippe; had heard Chopin in Vienna c. 1830-1 (nn. 37-38).
• Koryphäen (p. 391) — Schindler’s dismissive term for the star pianists whose programmes exclude the great masterpieces.
• Léon Escudier (pp. 391-392) — La France musicale, 27 February 1842, on the Pleyel concert of 21 February 1842 with Pauline Viardot and Franchomme (n. 40).
• George Hogarth (pp. 392-393) — Daily News, 10 July 1848, on Chopin’s second London matinée (7 July 1848, at Count Falmouth’s); identified by Eigeldinger from Chopin’s own letter, where the paper is garbled as “Delinius” (n. 41).
• Anonymous, Edinburgh Advertiser, 6 October 1848 (p. 393) — on the Hopetoun Rooms concert of 4 October 1848; the last dated notice, and the only one to describe Chopin’s system of fingering.
• Henri Blaze de Bury (p. 397, n. 29) — hostile counter-witness, Revue des Deux Mondes, 1 April 1842, signed with the pseudonym “Hans Werner”; source of the microscope-for-the-ear jibe.

Propositions

1. Chopin’s supremacy among contemporaries was asserted precisely on the grounds that he was not primarily a virtuoso: Heine prefers him to Thalberg while conceding he “is more a composer than a virtuoso” (p. 384). The Le Pianiste writer likewise singles him out as one “who prefers thought to the tour-de-force” (p. 390).
2. The Chopin/Liszt pairing is a standing critical device, and it is always resolved as a contrast of kind rather than degree. Balzac has the angel against the demon (p. 385). The Leipzig correspondent writes flatly that “The opposite of Chopin is Liszt” (p. 390). Schindler sets Chopin against “the so-called tyrant of the piano” (p. 391).
3. Writers repeatedly report that the instrument ceased to be audible as a piano: “what one hears is no piano” (Trémont, p. 386), “it is not a piano that speaks but a soul” (Custine, p. 385).
4. Small volume is stated as fact by hostile and friendly witnesses alike. Kahlert records that “The sound is not great in the sense of quantity but it is excellent in quality” (p. 388). Fétis, unsympathetically, notes that “He draws little sound from the instrument” (p. 389). The smallness is therefore not a detractors’ invention but a datum the admirers simply revalue.
5. Chopin’s compositions were held to be effectively unplayable by others, even accurately: Trémont reports that “the most exact performance of his compositions cannot convey what they became under his hands,” and that passages clear under Chopin’s fingers “sound confused and muddy when played by other pianists” (p. 386).
6. Trémont makes Chopin the unacknowledged teacher of the whole virtuoso generation — Thalberg, Liszt, Döhler, Dreyschock, Wolff, Henselt, Heller, Rosen “studied him attentively” — while denying he founded a school, because “He is too much himself to have had imitators” (p. 386).
7. Chopin’s technique was described from the outside as a negative technique: a “denial of all heaviness” achieved through finger independence and the lightest possible touch (Kahlert, p. 388) — and Kahlert makes the Etudes the necessary gateway to the other works.
8. Chopin himself deflected the technical crown to Liszt: Kahlert reports it as “almost incredible that anyone could acquire more skill than Chopin in the sphere of technique, though he has said that this is true of Liszt” (p. 388).
9. The 1829 Vienna review already isolates the mature traits — modesty, unconcern with effect, gentle accentuation, calm without “fiery ardour” (p. 387) — meaning the aesthetic that later writers treat as a Parisian refinement was legible at the very first public appearance.
10. That same review is the only one in the dossier to record a specific defect: “his inobservance of the accent marking the beginnings of new musical lines” (p. 387).
11. Chopin’s public career was constrained by health, not choice; Schindler frames the rarity of his concerts and the narrowness of his programmes as a loss to be “bewail[ed]” rather than as artistic reticence (p. 391).
12. Escudier explicitly rules out the orchestral-imitation ideal of piano playing for Chopin: “Do not ask Chopin to simulate grand orchestral effects on the piano” (p. 392), tying this both to his constitution and to his ideas.
13. Piano manufacture is part of the account: Escudier credits “M. Pleyel’s magnificent instruments” with lending themselves to Chopin’s shadings (p. 392).
14. The English and Scottish notices of 1848 shift the vocabulary toward finish and delicacy — Hogarth’s “liquid mellowness” and “pearly roundness” (p. 392). The Edinburgh Advertiser opposes this to “the ‘hammer and tongs’ work of the modern school” (p. 393).
15. The Edinburgh Advertiser preserves, at second hand, a pedagogical principle otherwise documented only through pupils: Chopin does not equalize the fingers but utilises them, with sliding on one finger and passing the longer over the shorter (p. 393).
16. Eigeldinger flags the intimacy argument as a critical cliché of the period, quoting Blaze de Bury’s parody of it in n. 29 (p. 397) — a deliberate check on the appendix’s own accumulating consensus.

Arguments

Why the testimony converges. The appendix is arranged so that agreement emerges without curation: literary witnesses first (who had every incentive to poeticize), then press notices in chronological order (whose writers were often unsympathetic). When Fétis in 1832 and Kahlert in 1834 and Escudier in 1842 and Hogarth in 1848 all report a small but exquisitely coloured tone, the observation survives the discount one would apply to any single source. The friendly witnesses and the hostile ones differ only in whether smallness is a defect: Fétis wants Kalkbrenner to supply “the sinew it needs” (p. 389); Kahlert and Le Pianiste treat the same trait as a positive achievement of quality over quantity.

Why Chopin could not be publicly assessed. Trémont’s pianiste intime argument is causal, not merely descriptive: the effects depend on a “finesse of touch” ranging from spider’s webs to imposing strength (p. 386), and such a range only registers where the acoustic and social conditions are small.

Schindler independently supplies the same structure with the added premise of illness: Chopin’s playing “does not impose itself through strength of attack, nor through the fiery brilliance used by others to secure the crowd’s applause, for Chopin’s health unfortunately forbids him all physical strain” (p. 391). Escudier reaches the same conclusion from the aesthetic side (p. 392). Three writers, three routes, one conclusion.

Why nobody else could play the music. Trémont’s inference runs: the notation underspecifies what Chopin did; the difficulties are of a kind (twelfths, sustained legato) that depend on hand build; therefore only those who heard him can even know what is missing, and “Only the overconfident will believe they can convey his entrancing music” (p. 386). He grounds this on Liszt’s own repeated testimony — the strongest possible authority, since Liszt is the one pianist who could not plead lack of facility. This is the appendix’s most consequential claim for performance practice: it makes the pupils’ evidence, gathered in the main body of the book, indispensable rather than merely illustrative.

Why the critical consensus deserves suspicion anyway. Eigeldinger does not let the intimacy topos pass unexamined. Note 29 identifies it as having “became something of a fixation in contemporary musical criticism” and prints Blaze de Bury’s hostile version — “his exquisite, delicate, marvellous talent – but a fragile one which screens itself from analysis” (p. 397) — which reproduces every element of the friendly account while reversing its valuation. The implication is that some of what looks like independent convergence may be a shared journalistic formula.

Evidence

• Concert-by-concert anchoring. The notices are tied by editorial note to specific datable events: Kärntnertor, 1829 (p. 387); Pleyel, 26 February 1832 (p. 389); Pleyel, 21 February 1842, programme reconstructed against the RGMP review down to individual opus numbers (n. 40); Count Falmouth’s, 7 July 1848, with a printed programme mentioning an interposed Ballade (n. 43); Hopetoun Rooms, 4 October 1848, with the Caledonian Mercury announcement of 2 October giving four solo groups and a surviving annotated Glasgow programme of 27 September in a private collection (n. 44).
• Manuscript sources. Trémont’s text is cited to page numbers of an autograph script (n. 30, F-Pn Fr. 12757), with the dates 1843 and 1849 in Trémont’s hand — the second written after Chopin’s death. An unpublished autograph note from Chopin to Trémont is transcribed in the same note.
• Attributions repaired. Hogarth is identified as the Daily News author against Hedley and Belotti, who print the review without naming its writer; the identification rests on Chopin’s own August 1848 letter to his family naming “Hogarth, who was Walter Scott’s beloved friend” (n. 41). Conversely, the Wiener Theaterzeitung review’s attribution to Bäuerle is marked as uncertain (n. 31), and Blaze de Bury’s “H.W.” is decoded as the pseudonym Hans Werner (n. 29).
• Cross-checks against the book’s main body. Trémont’s demand for “very long, slender fingers” is flagged with an explicit pointer to Mme Streicher’s contrary view at p. 68 (p. 386) — an editorial refusal to let a single witness settle a physical question.
• Corrections of the witnesses. Where a source is chronologically impossible, Eigeldinger says so: Liszt’s claim to have been present at the genesis of the op. 37/2 Nocturne is refuted from Chopin’s letters to Fontana and to Breitkopf & Härtel, since “Liszt was in fact outside France all of that time” (n. 9). Liszt’s misidentification of the “raindrop” Prelude in his own Chopin book is likewise noted (n. 10).
• Textual archaeology. Solange Clésinger’s reminiscence is dated to 1895 from a letter to Rocheblave of 19 January 1896 whose missing ending Georges Lubin supplied — “Last year I wrote (in answer to a request) twenty pages about him” — and its physical mutilation is documented from Roger de Garate’s note on the cover that Aurore Sand cut passages away in his presence (n. 21).
• Sand’s lost Prelude titles. Note 19 shows Solange’s imagery tracking George Sand’s text on op. 28 closely enough to propose reconstructions (no. 20 or 9, no. 4, no. 15), while note 20 records that the annotated copy that would settle the matter “is at present untraced,” confirmed absent from the Sand archives by Lubin.

Quotes

“he is not only a virtuoso but also a poet; he can reveal to us the poetry that lives in his soul” (p. 384)

“Chopin is the great poet of music, the artist of genius whose name should be mentioned only in company with those of Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini and Berlioz.” (p. 384)

“Besides [Liszt] all other pianists are eclipsed, with a single exception, Chopin, the Raphael of the pianoforte.” (p. 384)

“The Hungarian is a demon; the Pole is an angel.” (p. 385)

“You do not play on the piano but on the human soul.” (p. 385)

“it is not a piano that speaks but a soul, and what a soul!” (p. 385)

“I would name him the intimate pianist, and by that I mean that one must have part of his exquisite musical sensibility to appreciate its scope.” (p. 385)

“‘Mr Chopin,’ he said, ‘you reconcile me to the piano [vous me reposez du piano].’” (p. 386)

“and yet Chopin is frail and unwell; also he cannot show his range in public; he needs intimacy, a small number of friends” (p. 386)

“many passages, perfectly clear under his fingers, sound confused and muddy when played by other pianists” (p. 386)

“he accentuates only gently, like a person conversing in the company of cultured people, avoiding that rhetorical aplomb considered indispensable amongst virtuosos” (p. 387)

“His manner of playing is a denial of all heaviness, based on a maximum reciprocal independence of the fingers and on the lightest touch which can be imagined, the fruit of constant practice.” (p. 388)

“The sound is not great in the sense of quantity but it is excellent in quality.” (p. 388)

“His playing is elegant, fluent and graceful, possessing brilliance and distinctness. He draws little sound from the instrument” (p. 389)

“the notes which he plays are ripe, whereas those of most of his colleagues are green” (p. 390)

“Chopin is the prince of all pianists, Poetry in person at the piano.” (p. 390)

“The prime virtue of this great master of the keyboard lies in the complete truth of expression of every feeling, in which he excels and which cannot be imitated without lapsing into caricature.” (p. 391)

“one might well believe one is hearing small fairy voices sighing under silver bells, or a rain of pearls falling on crystal tables” (p. 392)

“he wishes to speak to the heart, not to the eyes; he wishes to love you, not to devour you” (p. 392)

“and yet we have never heard music which has so much the air of unpremeditated effusion” (p. 392)

“It is the exquisite delicacy, with the liquid mellowness of his tone, and the pearly roundness of his passages of rapid articulation” (p. 392)

“while all other pianistes strive to equalize the power of the fingers, M. Chopin aims to utilise them” (p. 393)

“there is in M. Chopin’s playing something perlé, rare, Aeolian, that simple mortals could not grasp” (p. 397)

Tensions and links

• Hand size. Trémont holds that Chopin’s music must be forgone “unless one has very long, slender fingers” (p. 386), and Eigeldinger’s own bracket sends the reader to Mme Streicher’s contrary view at p. 68. Unresolved in the appendix, deliberately.
• Who was the greater technician. Kahlert reports Chopin conceding technical supremacy to Liszt (p. 388), while Trémont has Liszt repeatedly conceding that Chopin’s own playing of his music was inimitable (p. 386). Both can be true only if “technique” means different things in the two sentences — mechanism vs. realization.
• Fétis vs. everyone after him. Fétis in 1832 treats the light sound as a deficiency to be corrected by Kalkbrenner (p. 389). Every later notice treats it as the point. The dossier’s chronological arrangement makes this reversal visible without comment.
• Praise and parody share a vocabulary. Trémont’s pianiste intime (p. 385) and Blaze de Bury’s microscope-for-the-ear (p. 397) describe the same phenomenon with the same terms and opposite verdicts, which complicates reading the consensus as purely observational.
• Nationality. Heine claims Chopin “is then neither Polish nor French nor German” and belongs to “the dream realm of poetry” (p. 384), against the Polish-melody framing in the Wilkońska fragment that opens the unit (p. 384). The de-nationalizing and nationalizing readings of Chopin are both fully formed in his lifetime.
• Continues 17-appendix-iv-i; the fragment at the top of p. 384 completes a Wilkońska passage begun there.
• Trémont’s claim that the score cannot convey what Chopin did with it is the external warrant for the book’s whole method — see the pupil testimony on touch, tone, and rubato in the main body and Appendices I-III.
• Kahlert’s insistence that the Etudes are the prerequisite for the other works (p. 388) connects to the pedagogical sequence in the main text.
• The Edinburgh Advertiser’s account of non-equalized fingers, finger-sliding, and passing longer over shorter (p. 393) corroborates, from a journalist who had never had a lesson, the fingering principles documented from the Projet de méthode.

Open questions

• Bibliography begins on p. 399 (confirmed). It does not appear before p. 398: pp. 393-398 are wholly given over to Appendix IV’s endnotes 1-44, and p. 398 ends with note 44 followed by an “OceanofPDF.com” watermark line, after which p. 399 opens with the “Bibliography” header and its first entry (Abraham, Chopin’s Musical Style). Appendix IV’s substantive text ends on p. 393 with the Edinburgh Advertiser notice of 6 October 1848. This is the last content unit; everything from p. 399 onward is reference matter and needs no reading notes.
• The Wiener Theaterzeitung review of 1829 is only “sometimes attributed” to Adolf Bäuerle (n. 31) — the attribution remains open.
• George Sand’s annotated copy of the op. 28 Preludes, which would fix her invented titles and thus clarify which Preludes were composed in Majorca, is untraced (n. 20). Note 19’s reconstructions remain conjectural.
• Solange Clésinger’s 1895 manuscript has had “numerous sentences, even paragraphs” excised by Aurore Sand (n. 21); what was removed, particularly concerning Chopin’s last illness, cannot be recovered.
• Trémont’s list of pianists who “studied him attentively” (p. 386) is asserted, not documented; whether Henselt, Dreyschock, Rosen and the rest actually heard Chopin is left to the reader.
• Escudier’s programme for 21 February 1842 is reconstructed to “perhaps about fifteen pieces” with the initial Andante only conjecturally that of op. 22 (n. 40) — the actual contents remain partly inferential.
• Whether the Le Pianiste ripe/green metaphor originated with “one of our most spiritual artists” whom the writer declines to name (p. 390) is unresolved; the attribution invites but does not permit identification.