On the history
The biographical facts and the framing of Hummel as a leading figure of the “brilliant” piano style that the young Chopin drew on — rather than a composer Chopin copied — reflect the standard, widely documented account of both composers’ lives found in general music-history references, including:
- Grove Music Online entries for Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Frédéric Chopin
- Jim Samson, The Cambridge Companion to Chopin (Cambridge University Press)
- Standard concert-programme and reference accounts of Hummel’s 1828 Warsaw visit and Chopin’s early exposure to his concertos
Dates for both concertos (Hummel’s Op. 85, c. 1816; Chopin’s Op. 11, composed and premiered in 1830) follow the commonly cited composition and premiere dates for each work.
Portraits
- Hummel portrait — an 1831 illustration from The Musical Gem: a souvenir for MDCCCXXXI, via Wikimedia Commons (“Johann Nepomuk Hummel 1831.jpg”), marked public domain (CC0/PD Mark 1.0).
- Chopin portrait — an 1883 etching depicting Chopin at age 23, via Wikimedia Commons (“Chopin etching.jpg”), marked public domain (CC0/PD Mark 1.0).
Both images have been resized for this site and given a grey, high-contrast “engraved” treatment in CSS; neither has been otherwise altered.
Recordings
The two audio clips on this site (Hummel’s Op. 85 and Chopin’s Op. 11) are MIDI-rendered excerpts, synthesised from a General MIDI soundfont — not recordings of a live pianist or orchestra. They are included purely as an illustrative, period-appropriate “now playing” touch, in the spirit of the autoplaying background music once common on fan pages like this one, not as a representation of how either concerto should actually sound in performance.
The look
The tiled treble-clef background, the ridge-bordered boxes, the bright block-letter title and the “best viewed at 800×600” badge are a deliberate pastiche of the personal home pages of the late 1990s — not a claim about how anyone actually built a site in 1998, just an affectionate exaggeration of it.
