Mikuli places a legato bow over the first three octaves—­so does Kullak—­Von Bulow only over the last two, which gives a slightly different effect, while Klindworth does the same as Kullak.  The heavy dynamic accents employed by Riemann are unmistakable.  They signify the vital importance of the phrase at its initial entrance.  He does not use it at the repetition, but throughout both dynamic and agogic accents are unsparingly used, and the study seems to resound with the sullen booming of a park of artillery.  The working-out section, with its anticipations of “Tristan and Isolde,” is phrased by all the editors as it is never played.  Here the technical figure takes precedence over the law of the phrase, and so most virtuosi place the accent on the fifth finger, regardless of the pattern.  This is as it should be.  In Klindworth there is a misprint at the beginning of the fifteenth bar from the end in the bass.  It should read B natural, not B flat.  The metronome is the same in all editions, 160 to the quarter, but speed should give way to breadth at all hazards.  Von Bulow is the only editor, to my knowledge, who makes an enharmonic key change in this working-out section.  It looks neater, sounds the same, but is it Chopin?  He also gives a variant for public performance by transforming the last run in unisono into a veritable hurricane by interlocked octaves.  The effect is brazen.  Chopin needs no such clangorous padding in this etude, which gains by legitimate strokes the most startling contrasts.

The study is full of tremendous pathos; it compasses the sublime, and in its most torrential moments the composer never quite loses his mental equipoise.  He, too, can evoke tragic spirits, and at will send them scurrying back to their dim profound.  It has but one rival in the Chopin studies—­No. 12, op. 25, in the same key.

II

Opus 25, twelve studies by Frederic Chopin, are dedicated to Madame la Comtesse d’Agoult.  The set opens with the familiar study in A flat, so familiar that I shall not make further ado about it except to say that it is delicious, but played often and badly.  All that modern editing can do since Miluki is to hunt out fresh accentuation.  Von Bullow is the worst sinner in this respect, for he discovers quaint nooks and dells for his dynamics undreamed of by the composer.  His edition should be respectfully studied and, when mastered, discarded for a more poetic interpretation.  Above all, poetry, poetry and pedals.  Without pedalling of the most varied sort this study will remain as dry as a dog-gnawed bone.  Von Bulow says the “figure must be treated as a double triplet—­twice three and not three times two—­as indicated in the first two bars.”  Klindworth makes the group a sextolet.  Von Bulow has set forth numerous directions in fingering and phrasing, giving the exact number of notes in the bass trill at the end.  Kullak uses the most ingenious fingering.  Look at the last group of the last bar, second line, third page.  It is the last word in fingering.  Better to end with Robert Schumann’s beautiful description of this study, as quoted by Kullak: