hich he expressed the wish that the
"Requiem" should be performed at his funeral service. Nothing, however,
shows his love for the great German master more unmistakably and more
touchingly than the words which on his death-bed he addressed to his
dear friends the Princess Czartoryska and M. Franchomme: "You will play
Mozart together, and I shall hear you." And why did Chopin regard Mozart
as the ideal type, the poet par excellence? Liszt answers: "Because
Mozart condescended more rarely than any other composer to cross the
steps which separate refinement from vulgarity." But what no doubt
more especially stirred sympathetic chords in the heart of Chopin, and
inspired him with that loving admiration for the earlier master, was
the sweetness, the grace, and the harmoniousness which in Mozart's works
reign supreme and undisturbed--the unsurpassed and unsurpassable perfect
loveliness and lovely perfection which result from a complete absence of
everything that is harsh, hard, awkward, unhealthy, and eccentric. And
yet, says Liszt of Chopin:--

His sybaritism of purity, his apprehension of what was
commonplace, were such that even in "Don Giovanni," even in
this immortal chef-d'oeuvre, he discovered passages the
presence of which we have heard him regret. His worship of
Mozart was not thereby diminished, but as it were saddened.

The composer who next to Mozart stood highest in Chopin's esteem was
Bach. "It was difficult to say," remarks Mikuli, "which of the two he
loved most." Chopin not only, as has already been mentioned, had works
of Bach on his writing-table at Valdemosa, corrected the Parisian
edition for his own use, and prepared himself for his concerts by
playing Bach, but also set his pupils to study the immortal cantor's
suites, partitas, and preludes and fugues. Madame Dubois told me that
at her last meeting with him (in 1848) he recommended her "de toujours
travailler Bach," adding that that was the best means of making
progress.

Hummel, Field, and Moscheles were the pianoforte composers who seem to
have given Chopin most satisfaction. Mozart and Bach were his gods, but
these were his friends. Gutmann informed me that Chopin was particularly
fond of Hummel; Liszt writes that Hummel was one of the composers Chopin
played again and again with the greatest pleasure; and from Mikuli we
learn that of Hummel's compositions his master liked best the Fantasia,
the Septet, and the Concertos. Liszt's statem