write to Chopin in Paris that he was anxious, before he departed this
Vale of Tears, to hear an opera from his pen, both for his benefit,
and for the glory of his country. Chopin took this admonition to heart
sufficiently to ask a friend to prepare for him a libretto; but that
is as far as the project ever went. Chopin must have felt
instinctively that his individual style of miniature painting would be
as ineffective on the operatic stage, where bold, _al fresco_ painting
is required, as his soft and dreamy playing would have been had he
taken his piano from the parlor and placed it in a meadow.

Besides Chopin's abhorrence of musical warfare and his avoidance of
the larger and more imposing forms of the opera, symphony, and
oratorio, there were other causes which retarded the recognition of
his transcendent genius. The unprecedented originality of his style,
and the distinct national coloring of his compositions, did not meet
with a sympathetic appreciation in Germany and Vienna, when he first
went there to test his musical powers. Some of the papers indeed had a
good word for him, but, as in the case of Liszt and later of
Rubinstein, it was rather for the pianist than for the composer. On
his first visit to Vienna he was greatly petted, and he found it easy
to get influential friends who took care that his concerts should be
a success, because he played for their benefit, asking no pecuniary
recompense. But when, some years later, he repeated his visit, and
tried to play for his own pecuniary benefit, the influential friends
were invisible, and the concert actually resulted in a deficit.

Chopin's letters contain unmistakable evidence of the fact that, with
some exceptions, the Germans did not understand his compositions. At
his first concert in Vienna, he writes, "The first allegro in the F
minor concerto (not intelligible to all) was indeed rewarded with