Who has played Chopin in a remarkable manner? The list is not large. Chopin himself must have been the greatest of all, though Liszt declared that his physical strength was not able to cope with the more heroic of his works. Liszt, Tausig, Rubinstein, Essipoff, Joseffy, Karl Heymann, Pachmann, and Paderewski—a somewhat attenuated number of names. Of course there were many others; but these represent supreme mastery in various phases of the master’s music. The real pupils all claimed to have inherited the magic formula, the tradition. To-day the best-known Chopin players are Joseffy, Rosenthal, Pachmann, Paderewski, and others. Each has his virtues, and to define their limitations, enunciate their excellences, would be critical hair-splitting. Nearly all the younger professional men and women play Chopin after approved academic models. He is expounded by æstheticians and taught throughout the land. He is mauled, maimed, thumped, and otherwise maltreated at conservatories, and the soul of him is seldom invoked, but floats, a wraith with melancholy eyes, over nearly every piano in Christendom. There have been and are charming interpreters of his music among women pianists. Paderewski told me that he never heard the mazurkas better played than by Marcelline, Princess Czartoryska, a beloved pupil of Chopin’s. We have never had the mazurkas so charmingly played here as by the wilful Vladimir de Pachmann; yet not even his dearest foe would dower that artist with great mental ability. But he is more feminine than any woman in his tactile sensibilities. Joseffy has far more intellectuality; Paderewski is more poetic. All three are, as all musical artists should be, feminine in their delicacy of temperament. Where, then, does woman enter this race, a race in which sex traditions are topsy-turvied? If women are deficient in brain weight, in nervous and spiritual powers, how is it that they dare attempt Chopin at all? Because, patient reader—and now I begin to draw in the very large loop I have made—men of science deal with the palpable, and the time for measuring and weighing the impalpable has not yet arrived. Because there is no sex in music, and because you may not be very moral or very intellectual, and yet play Chopin like “a little god”—as Pachmann would say. And now for my most triumphant contention: if the majority of women play Chopin abominably—so do the majority of men! II