In the twenty-third bar there is curious editorial discrepancy.  Klindworth uses an A natural in the first of the four groups of sixteenths, Kullak a B natural; Riemann follows Kullak.  Nor is this all.  Kullak in the second group, right hand, has an E flat, Klindworth a D natural.  Which is correct?  Klindworth’s texture is more closely chromatic and it sounds better, the chromatic parallelism being more carefully preserved.  Yet I fancy that Kullak has tradition on his side.

The seventeenth prelude Niecks finds Mendelssohn-ian.  I do not.  It is suave, sweet, well developed, yet Chopin to the core, and its harmonic life surprisingly rich and novel.  The mood is one of tranquillity.  The soul loses itself in early autumnal revery while there is yet splendor on earth and in the skies.  Full of tonal contrasts, this highly finished composition is grateful to the touch.  The eleven booming A flats on the last page are historical.  Klindworth uses a B flat instead of a G at the beginning of the melody.  It is logical, but is it Chopin?

The fiery recitatives of No. 18 in F minor are a glimpse of Chopin, muscular and not hectic.  In these editions you will find three different groupings of the cadenzas.  It is Riemann’s opportunity for pedagogic editing, and he does not miss it.  In the first long breathed group of twenty-two sixteenth notes he phrases as shown on the following page.

It may be noticed that Riemann even changes the arrangement of the bars.  This prelude is dramatic almost to an operatic degree.  Sonorous, rather grandiloquent, it is a study in declamation, the declamation of the slow movement in the F minor concerto.  Schumann may have had the first phrase in his mind when he wrote his Aufschwung.  This page of Chopin’s, the torso of a larger idea, is nobly rhetorical.

[Musical score excerpt]

What piano music is the nineteenth prelude in E flat!  Its widely dispersed harmonies, its murmuring grace and June-like beauty, are they not Chopin, the Chopin we best love?  He is ever the necromancer, ever invoking phantoms, but with its whirring melody and furtive caprice this particular shape is an alluring one.  And difficult it is to interpret with all its plangent lyric freedom.

No. 2O in C minor contains in its thirteen bars the sorrows of a nation.  It is without doubt a sketch for a funeral march, and of it George Sand must have been thinking when she wrote that one prelude of Chopin contained more music than all the trumpetings of Meyerbeer.

Of exceeding loveliness is the B flat major prelude, No. 21.  It is superior in content and execution to most of the nocturnes.  In feeling it belongs to that form.  The melody is enchanting.  The accompaniment figure shows inventive genius.  Klindworth employs a short appoggiatura, Kullak the long, in the second bar.  Judge of what is true editorial sciolism when I tell you that Riemann—­who evidently believes in a rigid melodic structure—­has