In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, act V, scene 1, we find this exchange between the two young lovers: <p>JESSICA: I am never merry when I hear… - Charles Rosen

Some of the Etudes in the first set, opus 10, were written by the time Chopin was twenty. It is with these pieces that Chopin's style was fully revealed in all its power and subtlety. Later works are sometimes more ambitious and, in a few cases, more audacious, but there were no radical changes of style, nothing to compare to the later revolutions we find in the careers of Haydn and Beethoven, or even in the shorter lives of Mozart and Schubert. Chopin's mastery was proven with the twelve Etudes of opus 10.

Folk music is always considered a good thing. There is a catch, however: it has to be "real" folk music, anonymous, evoking not an individual but a communal personality, expressive of the soil.

I have never believed that the historian should seek to perpetuate the misapprehensions of the past, and it is true that we understand Beethoven today better than his contemporaries did, better, above all, than the generation that immediately followed him, including his own most important pupil, Karl Czerny.