Chopin was a Pole. He had the melancholy of his race, but also its _verve_. Profoundly affected by his country's sorrow, he also had its haughty spirit. In Paris, where he spent the most significant years of his life, he was surrounded by the aristocracy of his own country who were in exile, and by the aristocracy of the arts. Liszt speaks of an evening at his salon where he met, besides some of the Polish aristocrats, people like Heinrich Heine, Meyerbeer, Delacroix, Nourrit, the tenor, and Bellini. Chopin admired Bellini's music, its clear and beautiful melodiousness, and I myself think that Chopin's melody often has Italian characteristics, although it is combined with harmony that is German in its seriousness, but wholly Chopinesque in all its essentials. In those numerous groups of ornamental, or rather semi-ornamental, notes, so many of them chromatic, and all of them usually designated by the technical term "passing notes," signifying that they are merely incidental to the melody and to the harmonic structure, there are nevertheless many that have far greater importance than if they were merely "passing." It is in bringing out this significance by slight accelerations and retards, by allowing a few of them to flash out here while the others remain slightly veiled, that the inspired Chopin player shows his true conception of what the composer meant by _tempo rubato_.
It was Liszt, afterward the first to recognize Wagner, who was the first to recognize Chopin. It was Liszt also who introduced him to George Sand (Mme. Dudevant), the great passion of his life. Chopin was the friend of many women. They adored his poetic nature, and there is much in his music that is effeminate, delicate and sensitive; but altogether too much has been made of this side of his art, and of certain morbid pieces like some of the Nocturnes. The affair with George Sand was not only a passion, but was a tragedy, and like all such tragedies it left on his music the imprint of something deeper and greater than mere delicacy and morbidity. Then, too, we have to count with his patriotism and his sympathy with his struggling country, and there is much more of the virile and heroic in his music than either the average virtuoso or the average listener allows for.