Op. 50, No. 3, shows how closely the composer studied his Bach. It is by all odds the most elaborately worked out of the series, difficult to play, difficult to grasp in its rather disconnected procession of moods. To me it has a clear ring of exasperation, as if Chopin had lost interest, but perversely determined to finish his idea. As played by Pachmann, we get it in all its peevish, sardonic humors, especially if the audience, or the weather, or the piano seat does not suit the fat little blackbird from Odessa. Op. 63, No. 3, ends this list of mazurkas in C-sharp minor. In it Chopin has limbered up, his mood is freer, melancholy as it is. Louis Ehlert wrote of this: "A more perfect canon in the octave could not have been written by one who had grown gray in the learned arts." Those last few bars prove that Chopin—they once called him amateurish in his harmonies!—could do what he pleased in the contrapuntal line.

Shall I continue? Shall I insist on the obvious; hammer in my truisms! It may be possible that out here on the Wissahickon—where the summer hiccoughs grow—that I do not get all the news of the musical world. Yet I vainly scan piano recital programs for such numbers as those C-sharp minor mazurkas, for the F minor Ballade, for that beautiful and extremely original Ballade Op. 38 which begins in F and ends in A minor. Isn't there a legend to the effect that Schumann heard Chopin play his Ballade in private and that there was no stormy middle measures? I've forgotten the source, possibly one of the greater Chopinist's—or Chopine-ists, as they had it in Paris. What a stumbling-block that A minor explosion was to audiences and students and to pianists themselves. "Too wild, too wild!" I remember hearing the old guard exclaim when Rubinstein, after miraculously prolonging the three A's with those singing fingers of his, not forgetting the pedals, smashed down the keyboard, gobbling up the sixteenth notes, not in phrases, but pages. How grandly he rolled out those bass scales, the chords in the treble transformed into a Cantus Firmus. Then, his Calmuck features all afire, he would begin to smile gently and lo!—the tiny, little tune, as if children had unconsciously composed it at play! The last page was carnage. Port Arthur was stormed and captured in every bar. What a pianist, what an artist, what a man!

I suppose it is because my imagination weakens with my years—remember that I read in the daily papers the news of Chopin's death! I do long for a definite program to be appended to the F-major Ballade. Why not offer a small prize for the best program and let me be judge? I have also reached the time of life when the A-flat Ballade affects my nerves, just as Liszt was affected when a pupil brought for criticism the G minor Ballade. Preserve me from the Third Ballade! It is winning, gracious, delicate, capricious, melodic, poetic, and what not, but it has gone to meet the D-flat Valse and E-flat Nocturne—as the obituaries say. The fourth, the F minor Ballade—ah, you touch me in a weak spot. Sticking for over a half century to Bach so closely, I imagine that the economy of thematic material and the ingeniously spun fabric of this Ballade have made it my pet. I do not dwell upon the loveliness of the first theme in F minor, or of that melodious approach to it in the major. I am speaking now of the composition as a whole. Its themes are varied with consummate ease, and you wonder at the corners you so easily turn, bringing into view newer horizons; fresh and striking landscapes. When you are once afloat on those D-flat scales, four pages from the end nothing can stop your progress. Every bar slides nearer and nearer to the climax, which is seemingly chaos for the moment. After that the air clears and the whole work soars skyward on mighty pinions. I quite agree with those who place in the same category the F minor Fantaisie with this Ballade. And it is not much played. Nor can the mechanical instruments reproduce its nuances, its bewildering pathos and passion. I see the musical mob of 1955 deeply interested when the Paderewski of those days puts it on his program as a gigantic novelty!

You see, here I have been blazing away at the same old target again, though we had agreed to drop Chopin last month. I can't help it. I felt choked off in my previous article and now the dam has overflowed, though I hope not the reader's! While I think of it, some one wrote me asking if Chopin's first Sonata in C minor, Op. 4, was worth the study. Decidedly, though it is as dry as a Kalkbrenner Sonata for Sixteen Pianos and forty-five hands. The form clogged the light of the composer. Two things are worthy of notice in many pages choked with notes: there is a menuet, the only essay I recall of Chopin's in this graceful, artificial form; and the Larghetto is in 5/4 time—also a novel rhythm, and not very grateful. How Chopin reveled when he reached the B-flat minor and B minor Sonatas and threw formal physic to the dogs! I had intended devoting a portion of this chapter to the difference of old-time and modern methods in piano teaching. Alas! my unruly pen ran away with me!