The fourth Scherzo, op. 54, is in the key of E. Built up by a series of cunning touches and climaxes and without the mood depth or variety of its brethren, it is more truly a Scherzo than any of them.  It has tripping lightness and there is sunshine imprisoned behind its open bars.  Of it Schumann could not ask, “How is gravity to clothe itself if jest goes about in dark veils?” Here, then, is intellectual refinement and jesting of a superior sort.  Niecks thinks it fragmentary.  I find the fairy-like measures delightful after the doleful mutterings of some of the other Scherzi.  There is the same “spirit of opposition,” but of arrogance none.  The C sharp minor theme is of lyric beauty, the coda with its scales, brilliant.  It seems to be banned by classicists and Chopin worshippers alike.  The agnostic attitude is not yet dead in the piano playing world.

Rubinstein most admired the first two Scherzi.  The B minor has been criticised for being too much in the etude vein.  But with all their shortcomings these compositions are without peer in the literature of the piano.

They were published and dedicated as follows:  Op. 20, February, 1835, to M. T. Albrecht; op. 31, December, 1837, Comtesse de Furstenstein; op. 39, October, 1840, Adolph Gutmann, and op. 54, December, 1843, Mile, de Caraman.  De Lenz relates that Chopin dedicated the C sharp minor Scherzo to his pupil Gutmann, because this giant, with a prize fighter’s fist, could “knock a hole in the table” with a certain chord for the left hand—­sixth measure from the beginning—­and adds quite naively:  “Nothing more was ever heard of this Gutmann—­he was a discovery of Chopin’s.”  Chopin died in this same Gutmann’s arms, and, despite de Lenz, Gutmann was in evidence until his death as a “favorite pupil.”

And now we have reached the grandest—­oh, banal and abused word—­ of Chopin’s compositions, the Fantaisie in F minor, op. 49.  Robert Schumann, after remarking that the cosmopolitan must “sacrifice the small interests of the soil on which he was born,” notices that Chopin’s later works “begin to lose something of their especial Sarmatian physiognomy, to approach partly more nearly the universal ideal cultivated by the divine Greeks which we find again in Mozart.”  The F minor Fantaisie has hardly the Mozartian serenity, but parades a formal beauty—­not disfigured by an excess of violence, either personal or patriotic, and its melodies, if restless by melancholy, are of surprising nobility and dramatic grandeur.  Without including the Beethoven Sonatas, not strictly born of the instrument, I do not fear to maintain that this Fantaisie is one of the greatest of piano pieces.  Never properly appreciated by pianists, critics, or public, it is, after more than a half century of neglect, being understood at last.  It was published November, 1843, and probably composed at Nohant, as a letter of the composer indicates.  The dedication is to Princesse C. de Souzzo—­these interminable