Of the unhappiness of his life it is quite sufficient to say that it was his own fault. His creed was the subjective, sentimental creed of the romanticists: ‘Sensible people,’ he exclaims, ‘cannot understand this intensity of being, this actual joy in existing, in dragging from life the uttermost it has to give in height and depth.’ He was haunted, too, by the romanticists’ passion for bigness. His ideal orchestra, he tells us in his work on Instrumentation, consists of 467 instruments--160 violins, 30 harps, eight pairs of kettle drums, 12 bassoons, 16 horns, and other instruments in similar abundance. His great importance in the history of music is, of course, his development of the orchestra. No one else has ever observed orchestral possibilities so keenly and used them so surely. His musical ideas, as played on the piano, may sound banal, but when they are heard in the orchestra they become pure magic. He never was a pianist; his virtuosity as a performer was lavished on the flute and guitar. For this reason, perhaps, his orchestral writing is the least pianistic, the most inherently contrapuntal of any of the period. He was a pioneer in freeing instrumental music from the dominance of traditional forms. Forms may be always necessary, but their _raison d’être_, as Berlioz insisted, should be expressive and not traditional. Berlioz was the first great exponent of program music; Liszt owes an immense amount to him. He was also the first to use in a thorough-going way the _leit-motif_, or the _idée fixe_, as he called it. Not that he developed the theory of the dramatic use of the _leit-motif_ as Wagner did, but he made extensive use of the melody expressive of a particular idea or personage. His output was limited, both in range and in quantity, but there are few composers who have had a higher average of excellence throughout their work--always on the understanding that you like his subject-matter. The hearer who does not may intellectually admit his technical mastery of the orchestra, but he will feel that the composer is sounding brass and tinkling cymbals. VII Frédéric Chopin was far less influenced by external events than most composers of the time. We have the legend that the C minor _Étude_ was written to express his emotions upon hearing of the capture of Warsaw by the Russians in 1831. We hear a good deal (perhaps too much) about the national strain in his music. The national dance rhythms enter into his work, and, to some extent, the national musical idiom, though refined out of any real national expressiveness. Beyond this his music would apparently have been the same, whatever the state of the world at large.