A dark, doleful nocturne is No. 6, in E flat minor.  Niecks praises it in company with the preceding one in E. It is beautiful, if music so sad may be called beautiful, and the melody is full of stifled sorrow.  The study figure is ingenious, but subordinated to the theme.  In the E major section the piece broadens to dramatic vigor.  Chopin was not yet the slave of his mood.  There must be a psychical programme to this study, some record of a youthful disillusion, but the expression of it is kept well within chaste lines.  The Sarmatian composer had not yet unlearned the value of reserve.  The Klindworth reading of this troubled poem is the best though Kullak used Chopin’s autographic copy.  There is no metronomic sign in this autograph.  Tellefsen gives 69 to the quarter; Klindworth, 60; Riemann, 69; Mikuli, the same; Von Bulow and Kullak, 60.  Kullak also gives several variante from the text, adding an A flat to the last group in bar II.  Riemann and the others make the same addition.  The note must have been accidentally omitted from the Chopin autograph.  Two bars will illustrate what Riemann can accomplish when he makes up his mind to be explicit, leaving little to the imagination: 

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A luscious touch, and a sympathetic soul is needed for this nocturne study.

We emerge into a clearer, more bracing atmosphere in the C major study, No. 7.  It is a genuine toccata, with moments of tender twilight, serving a distinct technical purpose—­the study of double notes and changing on one key—­and is as healthy as the toccata by Robert Schumann.  Here is a brave, an undaunted Chopin, a gay cavalier, with the sunshine shimmering about him.  There are times when this study seems like light dripping through the trees of a mysterious forest; with the delicato there are Puck-like rustlings, and all the while the pianist without imagination is exercising wrist and ringers in a technical exercise!  Were ever Beauty and Duty so mated in double harness?  Pegasus pulling a cloud charged with rain over an arid country!  For study, playing the entire composition with a wrist stroke is advisable.  It will secure clear articulation, staccato and finger-memory.  Von Bulow phrases the study in groups of two, Kullak in sixes, Klindworth and Mikuli the same, while Riemann in alternate twos, fours and sixes.  One sees his logic rather than hears it.  Von Bulow plastically reproduces the flitting, elusive character of the study far better than the others.

It is quite like him to suggest to the panting and ambitious pupil that the performance in F sharp major, with the same fingering as the next study in F, No. 8, would be beneficial.  It certainly would.  By the same token, the playing of the F minor Sonata, the Appassionata of Beethoven, in the key of F sharp minor, might produce good results.  This was another crotchet of Wagner’s friend and probably was born of the story that Beethoven transposed the Bach fugues in all keys.  The same is said of Saint-Saens.