f his
emotional life. The pianists for them, the real drawing-room composers
were Kalkbrenner, and Field, and Thalberg, with their operatic
fantasias. Chopin is the composer for the few, and he is the composer
_par excellence_ for musicians. From him they can get more ideas, and
learn more as regards form, than from anyone else, except Bach and
Wagner. In comparing his last works with his first, and noting their
progress, the mind tries in vain to conceive where he would have led
the world had he lived eighty instead of forty years. One thing is
certain: he would have probably written more for other instruments.
His pianoforte concertos belong to his early period, and betray a lack
of experience in the treatment of the orchestra. But he wrote two
pieces of chamber music which have never been excelled--a 'cello
sonata and a trio. The 'cello sonata was the last of his larger works,
and in my opinion it is superior to any of the 'cello sonatas of
Mendelssohn, Brahms, and even Beethoven and Rubinstein. The trio,
though an earlier work, is, like the 'cello sonata, admirably adapted
to the instruments for which it is written. I once belonged to an
amateur trio club. Our tastes naturally differed on many points, but
in one thing we all agreed: we always closed our entertainment with
this Chopin trio. It was the climax of the evening's enjoyment. Yet,
only a few years ago, the leader of one of the principal chamber music
organizations in New York admitted to me that he had never heard of
this trio!--an incident which vividly illustrates the truth of my
assertion that Chopin's genius is still far from being esteemed at its
full value.

II

HOW COMPOSERS WORK

Forty years ago Robert Schumann complained that the musical critics
had so much to say about singers and players, while the composer was
almost entirely ignored. To-day this reproach could hardly be made,
for although vocalists still receive perhaps a disproportionate share
of attention, compositions, new and old, are also discussed at great
length in the press. Nevertheless, I believe that the vast majority of
those who attend an operatic performance in New York, and are
delighted with "Siegfried" or "Faust," have but vague and shadowy
notions as to the way in which such an opera is composed. My object
here is to illustrate the way composers work, and to prove that the
creating of an opera is perhaps the most difficult and marvellous
achievement of the human i