be affected with the utmost rapidity, bordering upon simultaneousness of harmony in the case of many chords.”  Kullak has something to say about the grace notes and this bids me call your attention to Von Bulow’s change in the appoggiatura at the last return of the subject.  A bad misprint is in the Von Bulow edition:  it is in the seventeenth bar from the end, the lowest note in the first bass group and should read E natural, instead of the E flat that stands.

Von Bulow does not use the arpeggio sign after the first chord.  He rightly believes it makes unclear for the student the subtleties of harmonic changes and fingering.  He also suggests—­ quite like the fertile Hans Guido—­that “players who have sufficient patience and enthusiasm for the task would find it worth their while to practise the arpeggi the reverse way, from top to bottom; or in contrary motion, beginning with the top note in one hand and the bottom note in the other.  A variety of devices like this would certainly help to give greater finish to the task.”

Doubtless, but consider:  man’s years are but threescore and ten!

The phrasing of the various editions examined do not vary much.  Riemann is excepted, who has his say in this fashion, at the beginning: 

[Musical score excerpt]

More remarkable still is the diversity of opinion regarding the first three bass chord groups in the fifteenth bar from the close:  the bottom notes in the Von Bulow and Klindworth editions are B flat and two A naturals, and in the Riemann, Kullak and Mikuli editions the notes are two B flats and one A natural.  The former sounds more varied, but we may suppose the latter to be correct because of Mikuli.  Here is the particular bar, as given by Riemann: 

[Musical score excerpt]

Yet this exquisite flight into the blue, this nocturne which should be played before sundown, excited the astonishment of Mendelssohn, the perplexed wrath of Moscheles and the contempt of Rellstab, editor of the “Iris,” who wrote in that journal in 1834 of the studies in op. 10:—­

“Those who have distorted fingers may put them right by practising these studies; but those who have not, should not play them, at least not without having a surgeon at hand.”  What incredible surgery would have been needed to get within the skull of this narrow critic any savor of the beauty of these compositions!  In the years to come the Chopin studies will be played for their music, without any thought of their technical problems.

Now the young eagle begins to face the sun, begins to mount on wind-weaving pinions.  We have reached the last study of op. 10, the magnificent one in C minor.  Four pages suffice for a background upon which the composer has flung with overwhelming fury the darkest, the most demoniac expressions of his nature.  Here is no veiled surmise, no smothered rage, but all sweeps along in tornadic passion.  Karasowski’s story may be true regarding the genesis of this work,