[Musical score excerpt]

Klindworth fingers this passage more ingeniously, but phrases it about the same, omitting the sextolet mark.  Kullak retains it.  Von Bulow makes his phrase run in this fashion: 

[Musical score excerpt]

As regards grouping, Riemann follows Von Bulow, but places his accents differently.

The canvas is Chopin’s largest—­for the idea and its treatment are on a vastly grander scale than any contained in the two concertos.  The latter are after all miniatures, precious ones if you will, joined and built with cunning artifice; in neither work is there the resistless overflow of this etude, which has been compared to the screaming of the winter blasts.  Ah, how Chopin puts to flight those modern men who scheme out a big decorative pattern and then have nothing wherewith to fill it!  He never relaxes his theme, and its fluctuating surprises are many.  The end is notable for the fact that scales appear.  Chopin very seldom uses scale figures in his studies.  From Hummel to Thalberg and Herz the keyboard had glittered with spangled scales.  Chopin must have been sick of them, as sick of them as of the left-hand melody with arpeggiated accompaniment in the right, a la Thalberg.  Scales had been used too much, hence Chopin’s sparing employment of them.  In the first C sharp minor study, op. 10, there is a run for the left hand in the coda.  In the seventh study, same key, op. 25, there are more.  The second study of op. 10, in A minor, is a chromatic scale study; but there are no other specimens of the form until the mighty run at the conclusion of this A minor study.

It takes prodigious power and endurance to play this work, prodigious power, passion and no little poetry.  It is open air music, storm music, and at times moves in processional splendor.  Small souled men, no matter how agile their fingers, should avoid it.

The prime technical difficulty is the management of the thumb.  Kullak has made a variant at the end for concert performance.  It is effective.  The average metronomic marking is sixty-nine to the half.

Kullak thinks the twelfth and last study of op. 25 in C minor “a grand, magnificent composition for practice in broken chord passages for both hands, which requires no comment.”  I differ from this worthy teacher.  Rather is Niecks more to my taste:  “No. 12, C minor, in which the emotions rise not less high than the waves of arpeggios which symbolize them.”

Von Bulow is didactic: 

The requisite strength for this grandiose bravura study can only be attained by the utmost clearness, and thus only by a gradually increasing speed.  It is therefore most desirable to practise it piano also by way of variety, for otherwise the strength of tone might easily degenerate into hardness, and in the poetic striving after a realistic portrayal of a storm on the piano the instrument, as well as the piece, would come to grief.