The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung received no less than three reviews of it, two of them--that of Schumann and one by "an old musician"-- were accepted and inserted in the same number of the paper (1831, Vol.xxxiii., No.

49); the third, by Friedrich Wieck, which was rejected, found its way in the following year into the musical journal Caecilia.

Schumann's enthusiastic effusion was a prophecy rather than a criticism.

But although we may fail to distinguish in Chopin's composition the flirting of the grandee Don Juan with the peasant-girl Zerlina, the curses of the duped lover Masetto, and the jeers and laughter of the knavish attendant Leporello, which Schumann thought he recognised, we all obey most readily and reverently his injunction, "Hats off, gentlemen: a genius!" In these words lies, indeed, the merit of Schumann's review as a criticism.

Wieck felt and expressed nearly the same, only he felt it less passionately and expressed it in the customary critical style.