Mendelssohn is the inventor of religious kitsch in music. His first essay in this genre is a masterpiece, the Fugue in E Minor, published in 1837 but… - Charles Rosen

More positively, taking pleasure in music is the most obvious sign of comprehension, the proof that we understand it, and we may extend that to sympathy with other listeners' enjoyment ...

Above all, Chopin was the greatest master of counterpoint since Mozart. This will appear paradoxical only if we equate counterpoint with strict fugue, and Chopin wrote no formal fugues except as an academic exercise. His chief training, in both composition and keyboard playing, however, came from a study of Bach, and it was a study that engaged him all his life and which he always recommended to his pupils.

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.