THALBERG AND OTHER PIANISTS, 1871.


It was about fifteen years ago that Thalberg, who has just died only
fifty-nine years old, was in this country. Jenny Lind had been here
some years earlier, and Alboni and Grisi a little later, and
Vieuxtemps and Sivori and Ole Bull a dozen years before. Jullien, with
his monster orchestra, had given monstrous concerts in the monstrous
hall of Castle Garden, and many a musician of less fame had come to
try his fortune. But we had had neither of the acknowledged masters of
the piano, the founders of the modern school of playing--Liszt and
Thalberg. Liszt, spoiled and capricious, played very seldom. Chopin,
more a composer than a performer, we in America had never supposed
would cross the sea: so sensitive, so delicate, so shadowy, his life
seemed to exhale, a passionate sigh of music. In the stormy,
blood-soaked, ruined Paris of to-day it is not easy to imagine those
evenings at the Prince Czartoryski's, when Chopin played in the
moonlight the mazurkas and polonaises and waltzes which moonlight or
dreams seem often to have inspired, but through which the proud
movement of the old Polish dance and song triumphantly rings.

In George Sand's _Letters of a Traveller_ Chopin also appears, but
sadly and hopelessly. What Xavier de Maistre says of the Fornarina and
Raphael is the undertone of all the passages of the book that speak of
Chopin--"She loved her love more than her lover." Then came the burial
at the Madeleine, with his own funeral march beating time to his