‘Dear Aunt Sophie, please pray that Chopin might remain healthy, kind and contented with me. I want to work with all my soul, head and heart, then everything will turn out well’ (from a letter to Sophie Müller of 30–31 August 1840)

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Friederike Müller – one of Chopin’s favourite and most talented pupils – in 231 letters written to her aunts in Vienna, gives detailed accounts of her life in Paris. She writes (sometimes in highly critical terms) about artists, concerts, pianos and musical novelties, sketching out, in a way that is filled with youthful wit and temperament, a remarkably vivid picture of Parisian musical and social life in the early 1840s. Above all, however, she gives vivid and detailed descriptions of nearly every one of the 70 or so lessons she had with Chopin and quotes verbatim many of the conversations she had with him. Therein lies the extraordinary character of this material: this is not an account given a long time after, like the testimonies of other pupils, often based on recollections seen in a better light; it is one that conveys her immediate, fresh and unembellished experiences.