Singular master …

… Étude, Brute? - Commentary. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

Chopin …was a publicity-shunning introvert who played only his own music and performed mainly in the salons of Paris and England on increasingly rare occasions. He made his living teaching piano to well-heeled students of indifferent ability. He wrote no autobiography, died too soon to make records, and left behind no symphonies, string quartets, operas, or ballets for a later generation of writers to parse at leisure and at length.

By all rights, then, Chopin should have gone the way of the many other 19th-century pianist-composers whose renown did not outlive them. Instead, his music is as familiar today as it was at the time of his death in 1849. It is ubiquitous—but is it truly great?

I did not pay a lot of attention to Chopin's music until fairly recently. But I have come to love the nocturnes and preludes — a wonderfully poetic world of sound.