6. Nocturne, Preludes, Mazurkas et Impromptu.
7. Le Chene et le Roseau, chante par Madame Viardot-Garcia, accompagne par Chopin.
Maurice Bourges, who a week later reports on the concert, states more particularly what Chopin played. He mentions three mazurkas in A flat major, B major, and A minor; three studies in A flat major, F minor, and C minor; the Ballade in A flat major; four nocturnes, one of which was that in F sharp minor; a prelude in D flat; and an impromptu in G (G flat major?). Maurice Bourges's account is not altogether free from strictures. He finds Chopin's ornamentations always novel, but sometimes mannered (manierees). He says: "Trop de recherche fine et minutieuse n'est pas quelquefois sans pretention et san froideur." But on the whole the critique is very laudatory. "Liszt and Thalberg excite, as is well known, violent enthusiasm; Chopin also awakens enthusiasm, but of a less energetic, less noisy nature, precisely because he causes the most intimate chords of the heart to vibrate."
From the report in the "France musicale" we see that the audience was not less brilliant than that of the first concert:—
…Chopin has given in Pleyel's hall a charming soiree, a fete peopled with adorable smiles, delicate and rosy faces, small and well-formed white hands; a splendid fete where simplicity was combined with grace and elegance, and where good taste served as a pedestal to wealth. Those ugly black hats which give to men the most unsightly appearance possible were very few in number. The gilded ribbons, the delicate blue gauze, the chaplets of trembling pearls, the freshest roses and mignonettes, in short, a thousand medleys of the prettiest and gayest colours were assembled, and intersected each other in all sorts of ways on the perfumed heads and snowy shoulders of the most charming women for whom the princely salons contend. The first success of the seance was for Madame George Sand. As soon as she appeared with her two charming daughters [daughter and cousin?], she was the observed of all observers. Others would have been disturbed by all those eyes turned on her like so many stars; but George Sand contented herself with lowering her head and smiling…
This description is so graphic that one seems to see the actual scene, and imagines one's self one of the audience. It also points out a very characteristic feature of these concerts— namely, the preponderance of the fair sex. As regards Chopin's playing, the writer remarks that the genre of execution which aims at the imitation of orchestral effects suits neither Chopin's organisation nor his ideas:—
In listening to all these sounds, all these nuances, which follow each other, intermingle, separate, and reunite to arrive at one and the same goal, melody, do you not think you hear little fairy voices sighing under silver bells, or a rain of pearls falling on crystal tables? The fingers of the pianist seem to multiply ad infinitum; it does not appear possible that only two hands can produce effects of rapidity so precise and so natural…
I shall now try to give the reader a clearer idea of what Chopin's style of playing was like than any and all of the criticisms and descriptions I have hitherto quoted can have done. And I do this not only in order to satisfy a natural curiosity, but also, and more especially, to furnish a guide for the better understanding and execution of the master's works. Some, seeing that no music reflects more clearly its author's nature than that of Chopin, may think that it would be wiser to illustrate the style of playing by the style of composition, and not the style of composition by the style of playing. Two reasons determine me to differ from them. Our musical notation is an inadequate exponent of the conceptions of the great masters—visible signs cannot express the subtle shades of the emotional language; and the capabilities of Chopin the composer and of Chopin the executant were by no means coextensive—we cannot draw conclusions as to the character of his playing from the character of his Polonaises in A major (Op. 40) and in A flat (Op. 53), and certain movements of the Sonata in B flat minor (Op. 35). The information contained in the following remarks is derived partly from printed publications, partly from private letters and conversations; nothing is admitted which does not proceed from Chopin's pupils, friends, and such persons as have frequently heard him.
What struck everyone who had the good fortune to hear Chopin was the fact that he was a pianist sui generis. Moscheles calls him an unicum; Mendelssohn describes him as "radically original" (Gruneigentumlich); Meyerbeer said of him that he knew no pianist, no composer for the piano, like him; and thus I could go on quoting ad infinitum. A writer in the "Gazette musicale" (of the year 1835, I think), who, although he places at the head of his article side by side the names of Liszt, Hiller, Chopin, and- -Bertini, proved himself in the characterisation of these pianists a man of some insight, remarks of Chopin: "Thought, style, conception, even the fingering, everything, in fact, appears individual, but of a communicative, expansive individuality, an individuality of which superficial organisations alone fail to recognise the magnetic influence." Chopin's place among the great pianists of the second quarter of this century has been felicitously characterised by an anonymous contemporary: Thalberg, he said, is a king, Liszt a prophet, Chopin a poet, Herz an advocate, Kalkbrenner a minstrel, Madame Pleyel a sibyl, and Doehler a pianist.
But if our investigation is to be profitable, we must proceed analytically. It will be best to begin with the fundamental technical qualities. First of all, then, we have to note the suppleness and equality of Chopin's fingers and the perfect independence of his hands. "The evenness of his scales and passages in all kinds of touch," writes Mikuli, "was unsurpassed, nay, prodigious." Gutmann told me that his master's playing was particularly smooth, and his fingering calculated to attain this result. A great lady who was present at Chopin's last concert in Paris (1848), when he played among other works his Valse in D flat (Op. 64, No. 1), wished to know "le secret de Chopin pour que les gammes fussent si COULEES sur le piano." Madame Dubois, who related this incident to me, added that the expression was felicitous, for this "limpidite delicate" had never been equalled. Such indeed were the lightness, delicacy, neatness, elegance, and gracefulness of Chopin's playing that they won for him the name of Ariel of the piano. The reader will remember how much Chopin admired these qualities in other artists, notably in Mdlle. Sontag and in Kalkbrenner.