ts,
looking upon himself as self-taught. "I cannot create a new school,
because I do not even know the old," he said. It is this very absence
of scholasticism that is both the power and weakness of his music. In
reality his true technical ancestor was Hummel.

He played the E minor concerto first in Paris, February 26, 1832, and
some smaller pieces. Although Kalkbrenner, Baillot and others
participated, Chopin was the hero of the evening. The affair was a
financial failure, the audience consisting mostly of distinguished and
aristocratic Poles. Mendelssohn, who disliked Kalkbrenner and was
angered at his arrogance in asking Chopin to study with him, "applauded
furiously." "After this," Hiller writes, "nothing more was heard of
Chopin's lack of technique." The criticisms were favorable. On May 20,
1832, Chopin appeared at a charity concert organized by Prince de la
Moskowa. He was lionized in society and he wrote to Titus that his
heart beat in syncopation, so exciting was all this adulation, social
excitement and rapid gait of living. But he still sentimentalizes to
Titus and wishes him in Paris.

A flirtation of no moment, with Francilla Pixis, the adopted daughter
of Pixis the hunchback pianist--cruelly mimicked by Chopin--aroused the
jealousy of the elder artist. Chopin was delighted, for he was
malicious in a dainty way. "What do you think of this?" he writes.
"_I_, a dangerous seducteur!" The Paris letters to his parents were
unluckily destroyed, as Karasowski relates, by Russian soldiers in
Warsaw, September 19, 1863, and with them were burned his portrait by
Ary Scheffer and his first piano. The loss of the letters is
irremediable. Karasowski who saw some of them says they were tinged
with melancholy. Despite his artistic success Chopin needed money and
began to consider again his projected trip to America. Luckily he met
Prince Valentine Radziwill on the street, so it is said, and was
persuaded to play at a Rothschild soiree. From that moment his
prospects brightened, for he secured paying pupils. Niecks, the
iconoclast, has run this story to earth and finds it built on airy,
romantic foundations. Liszt, Hiller, Franchomme and Sowinski never
heard of it although it was a stock anecdote of Chopin.

Chopin must have broadened mentally as well as musically in this
congenial, artistic environment. He went about, hobnobbed with
princesses, and of the effect of this upon his compositions there can
be no doubt. If