is strikingly adapted for public performance, and perhaps Schumann was correct in believing that Chopin had originally sketched this for piano and orchestra.  Niecks asks if this is not the fragment of a concerto for two pianos, which Chopin, in a letter written at Vienna, December 21, 1830, said he would play in public with his friend Nidecki, if he succeeded in writing it to his satisfaction.  And is there any significance in the fact that Chopin, when sending this manuscript to Fontana, probably in the summer of 1841, calls it a concerto?

While it adds little to Chopin’s reputation, it has the potentialities of a powerful and more manly composition than either of the two concertos.  Jean Louis Nicode has given it an orchestral garb, besides arranging it for two pianos.  He has added a developing section of seventy bars.  This version was first played in New York a decade ago by Marie Geselschap, a Dutch pianist, under the direction of the late Anton Seidl.  The original, it must be acknowledged, is preferable.

The Bolero, op. 19, has a Polonaise flavor.  There is but little Spanish in its ingredients.  It is merely a memorandum of Chopin’s early essays in dance forms.  It was published in 1834, four years before Chopin’s visit to Spain.  Niecks thinks it an early work.  That it can be made effective was proven by Emil Sauer.  It is for fleet-fingered pianists, and the principal theme has the rhythmical ring of the Polonaise, although the most Iberian in character.  It is dedicated to Comtesse E. de Flahault.  In the key of A minor, its coda ends in A major.  Willeby says it is in C major!

The Tarantella is in A flat, and is numbered op. 43.  It was published in 1841 (?), and bears no dedication.  Composed at Nohant, it is as little Italian as the Bolero is Spanish.  Chopin’s visit to Italy was of too short a duration to affect him, at least in the style of dance.  It is without the necessary ophidian tang, and far inferior to Heller and Liszt’s efforts in the constricted form.  One finds little of the frenzy ascribed to it by Schumann in his review.  It breathes of the North, not the South, and ranks far below the A flat Impromptu in geniality and grace.

The C minor Funeral March, composed, according to Fontana, in 1829, sounds like Mendelssohn.  The trio has the processional quality of a Parisian funeral cortege.  It is modest and in no wise remarkable.  The three Ecossaises, published as op. 73, No. 3, are little dances, schottisches, nothing more.  No. 2 in G is highly popular in girls’ boarding schools.

The Grand Duo Concertant for ’cello and piano is jointly composed by Chopin and Franchomme on themes from “Robert le Diable.”  It begins in E and ends in A major, and is without opus number.  Schumann thinks “Chopin sketched the whole of it, and that Franchomme said ‘Yes’ to everything.”  It is for the salon of 1833, when it was published.  It is empty, tiresome and only slightly superior to compositions of the same sort by De Beriot and Osborne.  Full of rapid elegancies and shallow passage work, this duo is certainly a piece d’occasion—­the occasion probably being the need of ready money.