In the history of piano playing, of piano composition, Chopin was a man alone. Celebrated by his contemporaries and successors, by all the great pianist–composers of the Golden Age, the enchantment of his genius was to bewitch an epoch and beyond. To Balzac he was an ‘angel’; to George Sand he was ‘divine’; for Liszt he was ‘God’. A private person, a gentle artist, a musician of the profoundest vision, grand master of the concentrated and the encapsulated, there is no one with whom he can be compared.