How it makes the piano
sound--what a rich, brilliant sweep it secures! It elbows the
treble to its last euphonious point, glitters and crests itself,
only to fall away as if the sea were melodic and could shatter
and tumble into tuneful foam! The emotional content is not
marked. The piece is for the fashionable salon or the concert
hall. One catches at its close the overtones of bustling plaudits
and the clapping of gloved palms. Ductility, an aristocratic
ease, a delicate touch and fluent technique will carry off this
study with good effect. Technically it is useful; one must speak
of the usefulness of Chopin, even in these imprisoned, iridescent
soap bubbles of his. On the fourth line and in the first bar of
the Kullak version, there is a chord of the dominant seventh in
dispersed position that does not occur in any other edition. Yet
it must be Chopin or one of his disciples, for this autograph is
in the Royal Library at Berlin. Kullak thinks it ought to be
omitted, moreover he slights an E flat, that occurs in all the
other editions situated in the fourth group of the twentieth bar
from the end.
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