Chopin’s rst acquaintance with the music of Bach dates back to his childhood in Poland and his rst teacher; thus, Bach seems to have been with him from the beginning. But after his arrival in Paris in 1831 at age 21, two years after Mendelssohn had conducted the “St. Matthew Passion” in Berlin but before Bach had fully recovered from his long period of neglect, Chopin became a truly passionate devotee of Bach’s music. These were the years when he wrote the Etudes and Preludes—works, in particular, that show a strong in uence of Bach. In 1838, Chopin, in Majorca with George Sand, wrote to his friend and copyist, Julian Fontana, from “a huge deserted Carthusian monastery where in a cell with doors larger than any carriage-gateway in Paris you may imagine me with my hair unkept, without white gloves and pale as ever. The cell is shaped like a tall cof n, the enormous vaulting covered with dust, the window small . . . Close to [my] bed is an old square grubby box which I can scarcely use for writing on, with a leaden candlestick (a great luxury here) and a little candle. Bach, my scrawls [Chopin refers to his Preludes] and someone else’s old papers . . . Silence . . . you can yell [but] still silence.” The next year, he wrote—this time from George Sand’s estate in Nohant, since the Majorcan trip had been largely disastrous—that “when I have nothing particular to do I am correcting for myself, in the Paris edition of Bach, not only the mistakes made by the engraver but those which are backed by the authority of people who are supposed to understand Bach—not that I have any pretensions to a deeper understanding, but I am convinced that I sometimes hit on the right answer.”1 Much later, Chopin’s piano students continued to attest to his knowledge, from memory, of much of the WellTempered Clavier.2 Thus the alternate title of this article, Chopin’s advice to his pupil Madame Dubois during his last meeting with her in 1848 (a year before his death), is advice that he himself took very seriously indeed. For quite some time now, Chopin’s debt to Bach has been well known, particularly with respect to surface resemblances between Bach’s C-major Prelude (wtc I) and Chopin’s Etude op. 10, no. 1. Early in this century, Hugo Leichtentritt even went so far as to show how Chopin’s harmonic scheme could be rendered in Bach’s guration, and recently, Simon Finlow has demonstrated the reverse, as seen in Examples 1(a) and (b).3 Allen Forte and Stephen Gilbert have shown that the resemblance is more than super cial—that it affects deeper-level musical structure of the