Chopin's
musical ancestry is easily traced; as Poe had his Holley Chivers,
Chopin had his Field. The germs of his second period are all
there; from op. 1 to opus 22 virtuosity for virtuosity's sake is
very evident. Liszt has said that in every young artist there is
the virtuoso fever, and Chopin being a pianist did not escape the
fever of the footlights. He was composing, too, at a time when
piano music was well nigh strangled by excess of ornament, when
acrobats were kings, when the Bach Fugue and Beethoven Sonata
lurked neglected and dusty in the memories of the few. Little
wonder, then, we find this individual, youthful Pole, not timidly
treading in the path of popular composition, but bravely carrying
his banner, spangled, glittering and fanciful, and outstripping
at their own game all the virtuosi of Europe. His originality in
this bejewelled work caused Hummel to admire and Kalkbrenner to
wonder. The supple fingers of the young man from Warsaw made
quick work of existing technical difficulties. He needs must
invent some of his own, and when Schumann saw the pages of op.
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