And how difficult it seems to be to write of Chopin except in terms of impassioned prose!  Louis Ehlert, a romantic in feeling and a classicist in theory, is the writer of the foregoing.  The second Ballade, although dedicated to Robert Schumann, did not excite his warmest praise.  “A less artistic work than the first,” he wrote, “but equally fantastic and intellectual.  Its impassioned episodes seem to have been afterward inserted.  I recollect very well that when Chopin played this Ballade for me it finished in F major; it now closes in A minor.”  Willeby gives its key as F minor.  It is really in the keys of F major—­A minor.  Chopin’s psychology was seldom at fault.  A major ending would have crushed this extraordinary tone-poem, written, Chopin admits, under the direct inspiration of Adam Mickiewicz’s “Le Lac de Willis.”  Willeby accepts Schumann’s dictum of the inferiority of this Ballade to its predecessor.  Niecks does not.  Niecks is quite justified in asking how “two such wholly dissimilar things can be compared and weighed in this fashion.”

In truth they cannot.  “The second Ballade possesses beauties in no way inferior to those of the first,” he continues.  “What can be finer than the simple strains of the opening section!  They sound as if they had been drawn from the people’s store-house of song.  The entrance of the presto surprises, and seems out of keeping with what precedes; but what we hear after the return of tempo primo—­the development of those simple strains, or rather the cogitations on them—­justifies the presence of the presto.  The second appearance of the latter leads to an urging, restless coda in A minor, which closes in the same key and pianissimo with a few bars of the simple, serene, now veiled first strain.”

Rubinstein bore great love for this second Ballade.  This is what it meant for him:  “Is it possible that the interpreter does not feel the necessity of representing to his audience—­a field flower caught by a gust of wind, a caressing of the flower by the wind; the resistance of the flower, the stormy struggle of the wind; the entreaty of the flower, which at last lies there broken; and paraphrased—­the field flower a rustic maiden, the wind a knight.”

I can find “no lack of affinity” between the andantino and presto.  The surprise is a dramatic one, withal rudely vigorous.  Chopin’s robust treatment of the first theme results in a strong piece of craftmanship.  The episodical nature of this Ballade is the fruit of the esoteric moods of its composer.  It follows a hidden story, and has the quality—­as the second Impromptu in F sharp—­of great, unpremeditated art.  It shocks one by its abrupt but by no means fantastic transitions.  The key color is changeful, and the fluctuating themes are well contrasted.  It was written at Majorca while the composer was only too noticeably disturbed in body and soul.