The third Impromptu in G flat, op. 51, is not often played.  It may be too difficult for the vandal with an average technique, but it is neither so fresh in feeling nor so spontaneous in utterance as its companions.  There is a touch of the faded, blase, and it is hardly healthy in sentiment.  Here are some ophidian curves in triplets, as in the first Impromptu, but with interludes of double notes, in coloring tropical and rich to morbidity.  The E flat minor trio is a fine bit of melodic writing.  The absence of simplicity is counterbalanced by greater freedom of modulation and complexity of pattern.  The impromptu flavor is not missing, and there is allied to delicacy of design a strangeness of sentiment—­that strangeness which Edgar Poe declared should be a constituent element of all great art.

The Fantaisie-Impromptu in C sharp minor, op. 66, was published by Fontana in 1855, and is one of the few posthumous works of Chopin worthy of consideration.  It was composed about 1834.  A true Impromptu, but the title of Fantaisie given by Fontana is superfluous.  The piece presents difficulties, chiefly rhythmical.  Its involuted first phrases suggest the Bellini-an fioriture so dear to Chopin, but the D flat part is without nobility.  Here is the same kind of saccharine melody that makes mawkish the trio in the “Marche Funebre.”  There seems no danger that this Fantaisie-Impromptu will suffer from neglect, for it is the joy of the piano student, who turns its presto into a slow, blurred mess of badly related rhythms, and its slower movement into a long drawn sentimental agony; but in the hands of a master the C sharp minor Impromptu is charming, though not of great depth.

The first Impromptu, dedicated to Mlle. la Comtesse de Lobau, was published December, 1837; the second, May, 1840; the third, dedicated to Madame la Comtesse Esterhazy, February, 1843.  Not one of these four Impromptus is as naive as Schubert’s; they are more sophisticated and do not smell of nature and her simplicities.

Of the Chopin Valses it has been said that they are dances of the soul and not of the body.  Their animated rhythms, insouciant airs and brilliant, coquettish atmosphere, the true atmosphere of the ballroom, seem to smile at Ehlert’s poetic exaggeration.  The valses are the most objective of the Chopin works, and in few of them is there more than a hint of the sullen, Sargasson seas of the nocturnes and scherzi.  Nietzsche’s la Gaya Scienza—­the Gay Science—­is beautifully set forth in the fifteen Chopin valses.  They are less intimate, in the psychic sense, but exquisite exemplars of social intimacy and aristocratic abandon.  As Schumann declared, the dancers of these valses should be at least countesses.  There is a high-bred reserve despite their intoxication, and never a hint of the brawling peasants of Beethoven, Grieg, Brahms, Tschaikowsky, and the rest.  But little of Vienna is in Chopin.  Around the measures of this most popular of dances