Charles-Valentin Alkan was a man of deeply conservative views, whose style of life, manner of dress and faith in the traditions of earlier music marked him off from other musicians and from the world in general. It is not difficult to interpret his reclusive and enigmatic personality as a reaction to his failure to gain worldly success as a young man and his obvious distaste for the glamorous world of the piano virtuoso. Whether or not it was Liszt's success that brought this about, Alkan had thereafter every reason to be different from other pianists, other musicians and other composers, a tendency reinforced, it seems, by his upbringing and his religion.

His interest in music of the past was unusually keen for his time. Music, for most people, was contemporary music, and the revival of old works had little chance of winning a large audience; it was unthinkable at the Opéra, for example (with the exception of Don Giovanni). Fétis's ‘Concerts historiques’ were the domain of a small band of enthusiasts, not supported by the majority of the concert-going public. Eventually that was all to change so radically as to produce a standard concert repertory that consisted solely of music of the past, but in Alkan's time an enthusiasm for Bach or Rameau or even Mozart (beyond the best-known operas) was the mark of a specialist. Alkan's taste for eighteenth-century music was one of the unusual features of his character that became more pronounced towards the end of his life.