ways, given us a clue to their musical individuality, as well as their precise scholarship.  Klindworth is the most genially intellectual, Von Bulow the most pedagogic, and Kullak is poetic, while Riemann is scholarly; the latter gives more attention to phrasing than to fingering.  The Chopin studies are poems fit for Parnassus, yet they also serve a very useful purpose in pedagogy.  Both aspects, the material and the spiritual, should be studied, and with four such guides the student need not go astray.

In the first study of the first book, op. 10, dedicated to Liszt, Chopin at a leap reached new land.  Extended chords had been sparingly used by Hummel and Clementi, but to take a dispersed harmony and transform it into an epical study, to raise the chord of the tenth to heroic stature—­that could have been accomplished by Chopin only.  And this first study in C is heroic.  Theodore Kullak writes of it:  “Above a ground bass proudly and boldly striding along, flow mighty waves of sound.  The etude—­whose technical end is the rapid execution of widely extended chord figurations exceeding the span of an octave—­is to be played on the basis of forte throughout.  With sharply dissonant harmonies the forte is to be increased to fortissimo, diminishing again with consonant ones.  Pithy accents!  Their effect is enhanced when combined with an elastic recoil of the hand.”

The irregular, black, ascending and descending staircases of notes strike the neophyte with terror.  Like Piranesi’s marvellous aerial architectural dreams, these dizzy acclivities and descents of Chopin exercise a charm, hypnotic, if you will, for eye as well as ear.  Here is the new technique in all its nakedness, new in the sense of figure, design, pattern, web, new in a harmonic way.  The old order was horrified at the modulatory harshness, the young sprigs of the new, fascinated and a little frightened.  A man who could explode a mine that assailed the stars must be reckoned with.  The nub of modern piano music is in the study, the most formally reckless Chopin ever penned.  Kullak gives Chopin’s favorite metronome sign, 176 to the quarter, but this editor rightly believes that “the majestic grandeur is impaired,” and suggests 152 instead.  The gain is at once apparent.  Indeed Kullak, a man of moderate pulse, is quite right in his strictures on the Chopin tempi, tempi that sprang from the expressively light mechanism of the prevailing pianos of Chopin’s day.  Von Bulow declares that “the requisite suppleness of the hand in gradual extension and rapid contraction will be most quickly attained if the player does not disdain first of all to impress on the individual fingers the chord which is the foundation of each arpeggio;” a sound pedagogic point.  He also inveighs against the disposition to play the octave basses arpeggio.  In fact, those basses are the argument of the play; they must be granitic, ponderable and powerful.  The same authority calls attention to a misprint C, which he makes B flat, the last note treble in the twenty-ninth bar.  Von Bulow gives the Chopin metronomic marking.