estimate. Still, the book is no biography. It records few dates
and events, and these few are for the most part incorrect. When,
in 1878, the second edition of F. Chopin was passing through the
press, Liszt remarked to me:--

"I have been told that there are wrong dates and other mistakes
in my book, and that the dates and facts are correctly given in
Karasowski's biography of Chopin [which had in the meantime been
published]. But, though I often thought of reading it, I have not
yet done so. I got my information from Paris friends on whom I
believed I might depend. The Princess Wittgenstein [who then
lived in Rome, but in 1850 at Weimar, and is said to have had a
share in the production of the book] wished me to make some
alterations in the new edition. I tried to please her, but, when
she was still dissatisfied, I told her to add and alter whatever
she liked."

From this statement it is clear that Liszt had not the stuff of a
biographer in him. And, whatever value we may put on the Princess
Wittgenstein's additions and alterations, they did not touch the
vital faults of the work, which, as a French critic remarked, was
a symphonie funebre rather than a biography. The next book we
have to notice, M. A. Szulc's Polish Fryderyk Chopin i Utwory
jego Muzyczne (Posen, 1873), is little more than a chaotic,
unsifted collection of notices, criticisms, anecdotes, &c., from
Polish, German, and French books and magazines. In 1877 Moritz
Karasowski, a native of Warsaw, and since 1864 a member of the
Dresden orchestra, published his Friedrich Chopin: sein Leben,
seine Werke und seine Briefe (Dresden: F. Ries.--Translated into
English by E. Hill, under the title Frederick Chopin: His Life,