luding words of Elsner's
letter of September 14, 1834] that we can no longer see each
other and exchange our opinions! I have got so much to tell
you. I should like also to thank you for the present, which
is doubly precious to me. I wish I were a bird, so that I
might visit you in your Olympian dwelling, which the
Parisians take for a swallow's nest. Farewell, love me, as I
do you, for I shall always remain your sincere friend and
well-wisher.

In no musical season was Chopin heard so often in public as in that of
1834-35; but it was not only his busiest, it was also his last season
as a virtuoso. After it his public appearances ceased for several years
altogether, and the number of concerts at which he was subsequently
heard does not much exceed half-a-dozen. The reader will be best enabled
to understand the causes that led to this result if I mention those of
Chopin's public performances in this season which have come under
my notice. On December 7, 1834, at the third and last of a series
of concerts given by Berlioz at the Conservatoire, Chopin played an
"Andante" for the piano with orchestral accompaniments of his own
composition, which, placed as it was among the overtures to "Les
Francs-Juges" and "King Lear," the "Harold" Symphony, and other works of
Berlioz, no doubt sounded at the concert as strange as it looks on
the programme. The "Andante" played by Chopin was of course the middle
movement of one of his concertos. [Footnote: Probably the "Larghetto"
from the F minor Concerto. See Liszt's remark on p. 282.]

On December 25 of the same year, Dr. Francois Stoepel gave a matinee
musicale at Pleyel's rooms, for which he had secured a number of very
distinguished artists. But the reader will ask--"Who is Dr. Stoepel?"
An author of several theoretical works, instruction books, and musical
compositions, who came to Paris in 1829 and founded a school on
Logier's system, as he had done in Berlin and other towns, but was
as unsuccessful in the French capital as elsewhere. Disappointed
and consumptive he died in 1836 at the age of forty-two; his income,
although the proceeds of teaching were supplemented by the remuneration
for contributions to the "Gazette musicale," having from first to last
been scanty. Among the artists who took part in this matinee musicale
were Chopin, Liszt, the violinist Ernst, and the singers Mdlle.
Heinefetter, Madame Degli-Antoni, and M. Richelmi. The programme
com