avourite of Chopin's. The Viennese master's "Divertissement
hongrois" he admired without reserve. Also the marches and polonaises
a quatre mains he played with his pupils. But his teaching repertoire
seems to have contained, with the exception of the waltzes, none of the
works a deux mains, neither the sonatas, nor the impromptus, nor the
"Moments musicals." This shows that if Schubert was a favourite of
Chopin's, he was so only to a certain extent. Indeed, Chopin even
found fault with the master where he is universally regarded as facile
princeps. Liszt remarks:--

In spite of the charm which he recognised in some of
Schubert's melodies, he did not care to hear those whose
contours were too sharp for his ear, where feeling is as it
were denuded, where one feels, so to speak, the flesh
palpitate and the bones crack under the grasp of anguish. A
propos of Schubert, Chopin is reported to have said: "The
sublime is dimmed when it is followed by the common or the
trivial."

I shall now mention some of those composers with whom Chopin was less
in sympathy. In the case of Weber his approval, however, seems to have
outweighed his censure. At least Mikuli relates that the E minor and
A flat major Sonatas and the "Concertstuck" were among those works for
which his master had a predilection, and Madame Dubois says that he made
his pupils play the Sonatas in C and in A flat major with extreme care.
Now let us hear Lenz:-- He could not appreciate Weber; he spoke of
"opera," "unsuitable for the piano" [unklaviermassig]! On the whole,
Chopin was little in sympathy with the GERMAN spirit in music,
although I heard him say: "There is only ONE SCHOOL, the
German!"

Gutmann informed me that he brought the A flat major Sonata with him
from Germany in 1836 or 1837, and that Chopin did not know it then. It
is hard enough to believe that Liszt asked Lenz in 1828 if the composer
of the "Freischutz" had also written for the piano, but Chopin's
ignorance in 1836 is much more startling. Did fame and publications
travel so slowly in the earlier part of the century? Had genius to wait
so long for recognition? If the statement, for the correctness of which
Gutmann alone is responsible, rests on fact and not on some delusion
of memory, this most characteristic work of Weber and one of the most
important items of the pianoforte literature did not reach Chopin,
one of the foremost European pianists, till twenty years after i