This must have been the study that Chopin played for Henrietta Voigt at Leipsic, September 12, 1836.  In her diary she wrote:  “The over excitement of his fantastic manner is imparted to the keen eared.  It made me hold my breath.  Wonderful is the ease with which his velvet fingers glide, I might almost say fly, over the keys.  He has enraptured me—­in a way which hitherto had been unknown to me.  What delighted me was the childlike, natural manner which he showed in his demeanor and in his playing.”  Von Bulow believes the interpretation of this magical music should be without sentimentality, almost without shading—­clearly, delicately and dreamily executed.  “An ideal pianissimo, an accentless quality, and completely without passion or rubato.”  There is little doubt this was the way Chopin played it.  Liszt is an authority on the subject, and M. Mathias corroborates him.  Regarding the rhythmical problem to be overcome, the combination of two opposing rhythms, Von Bulow indicates an excellent method, and Kullak devotes part of a page to examples of how the right, then the left, and finally both hands, are to be treated.  Kullak furthermore writes:  “Or, if one will, he may also betake himself in fancy to a still, green, dusky forest, and listen in profound solitude to the mysterious rustling and whispering of the foliage.  What, indeed, despite the algebraic character of the tone-language, may not a lively fancy conjure out of, or, rather, into, this etude!  But one thing is to be held fast:  it is to be played in that Chopin-like whisper of which, among others, Mendelssohn also affirmed that for him nothing more enchanting existed.”  But enough of subjective fancies.  This study contains much beauty, and every bar rules over a little harmonic kingdom of its own.  It is so lovely that not even the Brahms’ distortion in double notes or the version in octaves can dull its magnetic crooning.  At times so delicate is its design that it recalls the faint fantastic tracery made by frost on glass.  In all instances save one it is written as four unbroken quarter triplets in the bar—­right hand.  Not so Riemann.  He has views of his own, both as to fingering and phrasing: 

[Musical score excerpt]

Jean Kleczynski’s interesting brochure, “The Works of Frederic Chopin and Their Proper Interpretation,” is made up of three lectures delivered at Warsaw.  While the subject is of necessity foreshortened, he says some practical things about the use of the pedals in Chopin’s music.  He speaks of this very study in F minor and the enchanting way Rubinstein and Essipowa ended it—­the echo-like effects on the four C’s, the pedal floating the tone.  The pedals are half the battle in Chopin playing.  One can never play Chopin beautifully enough.  Realistic treatment dissipates his dream palaces, shatters his aerial architecture.  He may be played broadly, fervently, dramatically but coarsely, never.  I deprecate