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r Flaubert's great chiselled art, and I would give a wilderness of Rubens for one Whistler. I know this may be a confession of aesthetic narrowness, but I never could bow down to overgrown reputations, nor does the merely big excite my nerves. In this matter I agree unreservedly with Mr. Finck. I would rather read Poe's Silence than all the essays of Macaulay, and can echo George Sand, who wrote that one tiny prelude of Chopin is worth all the trumpeting of Meyerbeer. It was in this spirit I approached Chopin years ago; it is in the same spirit I regard him to-day. But while my vantage ground has not perceptibly shifted, I descry a Chopin other than the melancholy dreamer I knew a decade ago. My glances are imprisoned by new and even more fascinating aspects of this extraordinary man and poet. It is of the greater Chopin I would speak; the Chopin not of yester-year, but the Chopin of to-morrow.

The old Chopin is gone for most of us. The barrel organ--not Mallarm?'s organ, but that deadly parallel for pianists, the piano-organ, with its super-Janko technic--now drives the D flat valse across its brassy gamut helter-skelter. The E flat nocturne is drummed by schoolgirls as a study in chord playing for the left hand, and the mazourkas--heaven protect us!--what have not these poor dances, with their sprightly rhythms, now wilted, been subjected to; with what strange oaths have they not been played? Alas! the Chopin romance is vanished. His studies follow those of the prosaic Clementi, and Du Maurier nabbed one of his impromptus for Trilby. Poor Chopin! devoured by those ravening wolves, the concert pianists, tortured by stupid pupils and smeared with the kisses of sentimentalists, well may you cry aloud from the heights of Parnassus, "Great Jove, deliver me from my music!"

What is left us in all this furious carnage, what undefiled in this continuous rape, this filching of a man's spiritual goods? Some few works unassailed, thanks to the master--some noble compositions whose sun-smitten summits are at once a consolation and an agony. To strive, to reach those wonderful peaks of music is granted but to the few. Even that bird of prey and pedals, the professional piano reciter, avoids a certain Chopin, not so much from instinctive reverence, but because of self-interest. He understands not, and also knows full well that his audiences do not. This hedges the new Chopin from cheap, vulgar commerce.

I have been criticised for asserting that in Chopin's later works may be found the germ of the entire modern harmonic scheme. It was not in the use of the chord of the tenth alone that Chopin was a path-breaker. Even in his first book of studies may be found a melodic and harmonic scheme, without which the whole modern apparatus of composition would not be as it is now. Does this sound daring? Come, put it to the test! That wonderful upward inflection which we look upon as Wagner's may be found in the G sharp minor part of the C minor study in opus 10. Look at it! Sift its significance and then revert to Isolde's Liebestod, or Wotan's entrance in the third act of Die Walk?re. There is the nub of the entire system of modern emotional melody. Take all the ?tudes and what treasures do we not find? The lovely Fantaisie-polonaise, op. 61, has an introduction which is marvellous and which will sound new a century hence. There is a kernel of a figure that will surprise the Wagnerite who knows his Ring. I speak of a triplet figure in sixteenths in the introduction. It was the late Anton Seidl who first called my attention to the "Chopinisms" of the wonderful love-duet in the second act of Tristan. He said Wagner had laughed about the coloring. If Wagner is the oak tree, then Chopin is the acorn of the latter-day music.

What is this new Chopin I pretend to see? Or is it only as the soul in Browning's poem, All that I Know of a certain Star? Does my Chopin star dart now red, now blue, for me alone? Chopin left us four ballades and a fantaisie in F minor, which is a tremendous ballade, although not in the traditional ballade form. But it has unmistakably the narrative tone; it tells an overwhelmingly dramatic story. Yet of the four ballades, who dare play the first and second in G minor and A flat? They are hopelessly vulgarized. They have been butchered to make a concert goer's holiday. The G minor, full of dramatic fire and almost sensual expression, is a whirlwind; unsexed by women and womanish men, it is a byword, a reproach. Little wonder that Liszt shuddered when asked to listen to this abused piece. As for the A flat ballade, I can say nothing. Graceful, charming, it appeals even to the lovers of music-hall ditties. It, too, has been worried to death. The one in F has been spared for us. It is a thunderbolt in a bed of violets. Its tempest, scurrying and growling, is for the hand of the master. Let no mean disciple juggle with its vast elemental tones. Disaster dire will surely follow. And when the sky has cleared how divinely azure it is! The lilt of the breezes with thin thunder in the distance closes a page that is immortal.

When young I had no god but Beethoven, and all other gods were strange. To-day, hemmed in by the noise and dust of the daily traffic of life, I have a tiny sanctuary which I visit betimes. In it is the fourth ballade of Chopin, the one in the mode of F minor. It is a masterpiece in piano literature as the Mona Lisa and Madame Bovary are masterpieces in painting and prose. Its melody, which probes the very coverts of the soul, is haunting in its chromatic coloring, and then that fruitful pause in half notes, the prelude to the end! How it fires the imagination; how unlike the namby-pamby Chopin of the school-room and the critics!

The ?tudes are beyond the limit of this paper. I can only say that they are enormously misunderstood and misread. Studies in moods, as well as in mechanism, they are harnessed with the dull, unimaginative creatures of the conservatory curriculum, and so in the concert room we miss the flavor, the heroic freedom of the form. Who plays the C minor in the opus 25? Who ever gives us with true bravoura that dazzling drive of notes, the A minor, the second of the tonality in the same book? De Pachmann plays the study in thirds, but it is only a study, not a poem. When will these series of palpitating music pictures be played with all their range of emotional dynamics?

The impromptus are almost denied us. The fantaisie impromptu and the A flat, are they not commonplaces, seldom played beautifully? A greater Chopin is in the one in F sharp, the second. There is the true impromptu spirit, the wandering, vagrant mood, the restless outpouring of fancy. It is delicious. The G flat is practically undiscovered. Of the mazourkas, the impish, morbid, gay, sour, sweet little dances, I need not speak. They are a sealed book for most pianists; and if you have not the savor of the Slav in you you should not touch them. Yet Chopin has done some great things in this form. Think of the three or four in C sharp minor, the one in B flat minor, the curiously insistent one in B minor and that sad, funereal mazourka in A minor, the last composition Chopin put on paper. The singular idea of the last named, almost a fixed one, its hectic gayety and astounding gloom show us the sick brain of the dying man. But it is not upon these works I would dwell. The new, the larger Chopin will be known to posterity by the three great polonaises in F sharp minor, in A flat and the fantaisie polonaise. What a wealth of fantasy there is in opus 61! Its restless tonality, the marked beauty of the first theme, the almost vaporous treatment, the violent mood changes and the richness of the harmonies place this work among the elect. The F sharp minor polonaise and the two in E flat minor and C minor contain some strong, virile writing. They need men, not pianists, to play them.

Professor Frederick Niecks calls the F sharp minor polonaise "pathologic," and Stanislaw Przybyszewski, that curious, half-mad genius who, like Verlaine, has seen the inside of prisons, has written surprisingly of the polonaise; indeed, he is said to play it well, and has coupled the composer's name with Nietzsche's in his strange brochure, The Psychology of the Individual. To me the piece far surpasses in grandeur all of Chopin's polonaises, even the "Heroic," with its thunderous cannon and rattling of horses' hoofs. It may be morbid, but it is also magnificent. The triplets in eighth notes in the introduction gradually work up to a climax of great power before the theme enters in single notes. Soon these are discarded for octaves and chords and do not occur again. The second subject in D flat is less drastic, less fantastic, and also less powerful. There is epical breadth in that beginning, and at each reiteration it grows bigger, more awful, until it overflows the limits of the keyboard. That strange intermezzo in A, which comes before the mazourka, is an enigma for most of us. It seems at first irrelevant, but its orchestral intent is manifest, and it leads to the D flat theme now transposed to C sharp minor and full of the blackest despair. If you play the thirty-second notes in octaves more color is obtained. The mazourka which follows tempted Liszt to extravagant panegyric. Its brace of notes, thirds and sixths, are lovely in accent and hue, but do not become languishing in your tempo, or the episode turns sugary and sentimental. With an almost ferocious burst the polonaise is reached, and again begins that elemental chant, which grows huger in rancorous woe until the bottom of the pit is reached, and then without a gleam of light the work ends in a coda, with mutterings like curses of the polonaise theme, and only in the very last bar comes the relief of a crackling and brilliant F sharp in octaves.

Pathologic in a sense it is, for it makes its primary appeal to the nerves, but it is wonderful music, though depressing. It hurts the very pulp of one's sensibilities, yet it is never sensational. I am reminded of Salvator Rosa's rugged, sullen and barbarous landscapes with a modern figure in the foreground, agitated, distracted, suicidal; in a word, something that paint and canvas can never suggest.

The nocturnes are sometimes beneath contempt. When I hear a Chopin nocturne played on the fiddle or 'cello I murmur complainingly as I listen, for it irresistibly reminds me of degraded beauty. There are exceptions. The vandals have vouchsafed us the one in C sharp minor, the gloomiest and grandest of Chopin's moody canvases. Its middle section is Beethovian in breadth. Ah! my friend, why do you take this piano composer for a weakling? Why give him over to the tough mercies of the Young Person? I would sentence to a vat of boiling oil, that is if I were the Sultan of Life, any woman who presumed to touch a note of Chopin. They have decked the most virile spirit of the age in petticoats, and upon his head they have placed a Parisian bonnet. They murdered him while he was alive, and they have hacked and cut at him since his death. If women must play the piano let them stick to Bach and Beethoven. They cannot hurt those gentlemen with their seductions and blandishments, their amblings and jiggings. There are several other nocturnes that will never appeal to hoi polloi. The noble one in C minor, the fruity one in B and the one in E, form a triad of matchless music. They are not popular. The wonder-child that came to us through the pink gates of the dawn and was rocked to rhythmic dreams in the ber?euse has grown to be a brat of horrid mien and muscular proportions. I will have none of it. Its banal visage is cherished in conservatories. Long may it howl, but not for me!

The scherzi, the preludes, you cry! Ah! at last we are getting upon solid ground. The twenty-five preludes alone would make good Chopin's claim to immortality. Such range, such vision, such humanity! All shades of feeling are divined, all depths and altitudes of passion explored. If all Chopin, all music, were to be destroyed, I should plead for the preludes. The cameo stillness of some of them is as soft-spoken sentences in a cloister. Religious truly, but these appeal less to me than those thunder-riven visions in D minor, in B flat minor, in F minor, in E flat minor. Surpassingly sweet is the elegiac prelude in B flat. It is greater than any of the Chopin nocturnes. Number two, with its almost brutal quality and enigmatic beginning, is for a rainy day--a day when the soul is racked by doubts and defeats. It is shuddersome and sinister. About it hovers the grisly something which we all fear in the dark but dare not define. A ray of sunshine, but a sun that slants in the west, is the prelude in G. Why detail these marvels in miniature, these great and cunningly wrought thoughts?

The embroideries of the barcarolle--a more fully developed and dramatic nocturne--and the bolero are both more Polish than Italian or Spanish. The fantaisie, opus 49, is considered by many to be Chopin's most perfect work. The grave, march-like introduction, the climbing and insistent arpeggio figures in triplets, the great song in F minor, followed by the beautiful episode in double notes and the climax of amazing power and almost brutality, give us glimpses of the new Chopin. There is development, but only of tonality--if such may be called development--and the lento sostenuto is curt and very sweet. The end is impressive. The entire composition is larger in scope, its phrases fuller breathed, and there is a massiveness absent from much of the master's music. To my own way of thinking this fantaisie, with the F sharp minor polonaise, the F minor ballade, the C sharp minor and B minor scherzi, the D minor prelude, the sonatas in B flat minor and B minor, and the C minor study , are Chopin at the top of his powers.

Frederic Chopin bequeathed to the world six solo scherzi. The four that comprise a group are opus 20, in B minor, published February, 1835; opus 31, in B flat minor, published December, 1837; opus 39, in C sharp minor, published October, 1840, and opus 54, in E major, published December, 1843. The other two are to be found in his second sonata, opus 35, and his third sonata, opus 58. They are in the respective keys of E flat minor and E flat major. These six compositions are the finest evidences of Chopin's originality, variety, power and delicacy. The scherzo is not his invention--Beethoven and Mendelssohn anticipated him--but he took the form, remodelled and filled it with a surprisingly novel content, although not altering its three-four measure. We feel the humor of the Beethoven scherzo, its swing, robustness and at times rude jollity. In Mendelssohn one enjoys the lightness, velocity and finish of his scherzando moods. They contain, strictly speaking, more of the truer scherzo idea than Chopin's. Mendelssohn's delicate sentiment of joyousness came from the early Italian masters of the piano. Rossini voiced this when he said, after hearing a capriccio of Felix the Feminine, "?a sent de Scarlatti." Yet the Mendelssohn piano pieces of this character are finely considered efforts, full of a certain gracious life and a surface skimming of sentiment, like the curved flight of a thin bird over shallow waters.

But we enter a terrible and a beautiful domain in the Chopin scherzi. Two only have the lightness of touch, clarity of atmosphere and sweet gayety of the veritable scherzo. The other four are fierce, grave, sardonic, demoniacal, ironic, passionate, fiery, hysterical and most melancholy. In some the moods are almost pathologic; in some enigmatic; in all, the moods are magical. The scherzo in E, opus 54, can be described by no better or more commonplace a word than delightful. It is delightful, sunny music, and its swiftness, directness and sweep are compelling. The five preluding bars of half notes, unisono, at once strike the keynote of optimism and sweet faith. What follows is the ruffling of the tree-tops by warm south winds. The upward little flight in E, beginning at the seventeenth bar and in major thirds and fourths, has been boldly utilized by Saint-Sa?ns in the scherzo of his G minor piano concerto. The fanciful embroidery of the single finger passages is not opaque as in other of this master's compositions. A sparkling, bubbling clarity, freedom, freshness, characterizes this scherzo so seldom heard in our concert rooms. In emotional content it is not deep; it lies well within the categories of the elegant and the capricious. It contains on its fourth page an episode in E which at first blush suggests the theme of the valse in A flat, opus 42, with its interminglement of duple and triple rhythms. The piu lento further on, in C sharp minor, has little sadness. It is but the blur of a passing cloud that shadows with its fleecy edges the wind-swept moorland. This scherzo in E is emphatically a mood of joyousness, as joyous as the witty, sensitive Pole ever allowed himself to be. Its coda is not so forceful as the usual Chopin coda, and there is a dazzling flutter of silvery scale at the end. It is a charming work. Closely allied to it in general sentiment is the E flat scherzo in the B minor sonata. It is largely arabesque and its ornamentation is genial, though not ingenious. To me this scherzo savors somewhat of Weber. It might go on forever. The resolution is not intellectual--is purely one of tonality. The thought is tenuous; it is a light, highly embroidered relief after the first movement of the sonata. The trio in B is not particularly noteworthy. Truly a salon scherzo and challenges Mendelssohn on his native heath. It must be considered as an intermezzo and also as a prelude to the lyric measures of the beautiful largo that follows.

We get on firm and familiar footing when the first page of the B flat minor scherzo is opened. Who has not heard with awe those arched questioning triplets which Chopin could never get his pupils to play sufficiently tomb?? "It must be a charnel house," he told De Lenz. These vaulted phrases have become banal. Alas! this scherzo, like the lovely A flat ballade, has been done to a cruel death. Yet how fresh, how vigorous, how abounding with sweetness and light when it falls from the fingers of a master! It is a Byronic poem, "so tender, so bold, so as full of love as of scorn," to quote Schumann. Has Chopin ever penned a more delicious song than the one in D flat, with its straying over the borderlands of G flat? It is the high noon of love, life and happiness; the dark bud of the introduction has burst into a perfect flowering, and what miracles of scent, color, shape we seize! The section in A has the quality of great art--great, questioning, but sane, noble art. It is serious to severity, and yet how penetrating in perfume!

The excursion in C sharp minor is an awakening of the wondering dream, but it is balanced; it is healthy. No suggestion of the pallid morbidities of the other Chopin. And how supremely welded is the style with the subject! What masterly writing and it lies in the very heart of the piano! A hundred generations may not improve on these pages. Then, fearful that he has dwelt too long upon the idea, Chopin breaks away into the key of E, and one of those bursts into clear sky follows. After the repetition comes the working-out section, and, while ingenious and effective, it is always in the development that he is at his weakest. The Olympian aloofness of Beethoven, Chopin had not. He cannot survey his material from all points. He is a great composer, but he is also a great pianist. He nursed his themes with wonderful constructive frugality; the instrument often checked his imagination. There is a logic in this exposition, but it is piano logic and not always music logic. A certain straining after brilliancy, a falling off in the spontaneous urge of the early pages force us to feel happy when the first triplet figure returns. The coda is brilliantly strong. This scherzo will remain the favored one. It is not cryptic and repellent like the two in B minor and C sharp minor, and is a perennial joy to pupil and public alike.

We now trench upon a sacred and not often explored territory of the Chopin music. The scherzo in E flat minor is one of the most powerful of the six. To play it effectively one needs breadth of style, a heroic spirit and fingers and wrists of steel. The tremendous crescendo in one bar taxes the strength of most pianists. The composition has something elemental about it. It is true storm music, and the whistling of the wind in the chromatic successions of chords of the sixth has an eerie effect on one's nerves. None of the Chopin scherzi stir me as this one. There is menacing gloom in the second bar, and the rush and grandeur of the movement take my breath away. The blissful song in G flat is not uninterrupted bliss. There is a threatening undercurrent, as if the howling tempest might return; it does, and how originally Chopin manages this! The descending octaves, which seem to carry us to the mouth of hell, are burst in upon by the first stormy theme, and again we are madly projected through space, a victim of the elements. Defiance, satanic pride, the majesty of the microcosm, a spiritual challenge to fate are all here. The lulling, lovely lines of the piu lento steal in again and the curtain rings down on a great picture of passion and pain.

Chopin's first scherzo in B minor bears an early opus number. It is his twentieth work--the most sombre, yet the most shrill and hysterical of the scherzi. It is in his most ironic, yet most reckless, vein; Chopin throwing himself to the very winds of remorse. A terrible mood, a Manfred mood, a torturing mood. A soul-shriek from the first chord to the last, with one dream inclosed within its gates of brass, it reminds one of the struggles of an imprisoned soul beating with wounded palms its prison door. It is the unhappiest, the most riotous of Chopin's works and suffers from prolixity. Its keynote is too tense for the da capos marked by the composer, and unsuited for latter-day taste. Some virtuosi play this scherzo without the repeats, and the piece gains greatly. It is so harsh, so drastic, that the wondrous melody in B, with its lapping, lilting tenths--"the sweet slumber of the moonlight on the hills"--after the tragic strain, comes like a benediction. This scherzo has almost had a special message. Chopin, like Robert Louis Stevenson, was afflicted with weak health, was slender of frame, but his spirit was brave as the lion's. Both men could write terrible things, even though they could not compass them. The sense of impotence, of stifled longings, fills this scherzo with inarticulate moans and bewailings. What a life tragedy is the opus 20!

The arabesque-like figure after the eight bar introduction--muted bars some of them, as was Chopin's wont--has a certain spiritual likeness to the principal figure in the C sharp minor fantaisie-impromptu. But instead of the ductile triplets, as in the bass of the impromptu, we divide the figure in the scherzo between the two hands, and the harshness of the mood is emphasized by the anticipatory chord in the left hand. The vitality of the first page of this scherzo is marvellous. The questioning chords at the close of the section are as imaginative as any passages Chopin ever wrote. The half notes E and the up-leaping appogiatura are also evidences of his originality in minor details. These occur just before the modulation into the lyric theme in B and with a slight change just at the dash into the coda. The second section, an agitato, contains some knotty harmonic problems. But they must be skimmed over at tempestuous speed, else cacophony. Bold here is Chopin to excess, as if his spirit would knock at the very gate of heaven, but the surge and thunder waxes, wanes, wastes itself; the soul has stormed itself to slumber. The molto piu lento of this scherzo is, by consent, one of Chopin's masterpieces. It is written in the richly colored, luscious key of B major. It is so fragrant, so replete with woven enchantment, that the air becomes divinely dense. With broken tenths, Chopin produces subtle effects. It is all a miracle of tender beauty, and is like some old world Armida's garden, when time was young and men and women lived to love and not to sorrow. It is only comparable to the B major episode in the B minor ?tude or to the Tuberose nocturne of the same key. Mark how the composer returns to his first savage mood! It is a picture of contrasted violence. But beware of the da capo. It grows wearisome. Far better repeat the first section only and attack the coda--the finest coda ever made by the master. I know nothing of his that can equal its boldness, its electrifying ride across country, its almost barbaric impetuosity. The heavy accentuation on the first note of every bar must not blind one's rhythmical sense to the second beat in the left hand, which is likewise accented. This produces a mixed rhythm that greatly adds to the general murkiness and despair of the finale. Those daring chordal dissonances, so logical, so effective, how they must have agitated and scratched the nerves of Chopin's contemporaries! And they must be vigorously insisted upon; no veiled half lights, for the worst is over; the ships are burned; nothing remains but the awful catastrophe. To his death goes this musical Childe Roland, and the dark tower crumbles and creation crumbles at the close. The scherzo ends in chaos, overwhelming, supreme!

I think it was Tausig who first taught his pupils to use the interlocked octaves at the close instead of the chromatic scale in unison. I suppose Liszt did it before anyone else; he always thought of such things, even if the composer did not. I doubt not but that Chopin would have objected to the innovation, although it seems admissible. After the furious Hercules-vein of the coda, to finish with a chromatic scale sounds tame and ineffectual.

Even though the sneer, the peevishness and fretfulness of a restless, unhappy, sick-brained man disturb it, the C sharp minor scherzo is yet the most dramatic, the most finely moulded of the six. It is capricious to madness, but the dramatic quality is unmistakable. It seethes with scorn, if such an extravagant figure is permissible. It is all extravagance, fire and fury, but it signifies something. Just a word about the tempo. Nearly all the scherzi are marked presto, but it should be remembered that it is the presto of Chopin's day, and, above all, of Chopin's piano action. The action of the pianos of his time, especially of the Pleyel piano, was superlatively light and elastic. The Chopin tempi should be moderated, as Theodore Kullak has so often insisted. You lose in ponderability and dignity by adopting the swift, old-fashioned time markings. The first part of the B minor scherzo may be taken at a presto--a comfortable presto, the scherzo in E must be played presto; also the one in E flat; but where the thought takes on a graver hue, where majesty of utterance or nobility of phrase are to be considered, moderate your pulses, I conjure you, master pianists. The C sharp minor scherzo is an especial sufferer from a too hurried speed. The architectonics are consequently blurred, details jumbled and the indescribable power of the piece lost. And if you start out with such a fiery presto, where will you get your contrast of speed in the coda, which should be fairly shot out from your finger-tips? Or would you emulate Schumann and start in with a prestissimo possible and follow with still more of a prestissimo? You remember his sonata? Try a presto by all means, but remember the heavier tone mass of the modern piano. This scherzo is a massive composition, yet full of fitful starts and surprises. The bits of chorale in the trio are hugely Chopin as to fioritura and harmonic basis. More than all the others this one reminds you of some pulse-stirring drama. It is audacious and declamatory. Even in the meno mosso it never tarries, and the coda is built of one of those familiar figures cumulative in effect through repetition and all written eminently for the instrument. The scherzo in C sharp minor is grotesque; it is original. It has affinities with the darkling conceptions of Poe, Coleridge, Hoffman, and is Heine-like in its bitter irony. It is like some fantastic, sombre pile of disordered farouche architecture, and about it hovers perpetual night and the unspeakable and despairing things that live in the night. It is a tale from Poe's "iron bound, melancholy volume of the magi," and on its face is written the word Spleen. Chopin might have said with Poe: "Then I grew angry and cursed, with the curse of Spleen, the river and the lilies and the wind and the forest and the heavens and the thunder and the sighs of the water lilies. And they became accursed and were still. And the moon ceased to totter up its pathway to heaven--and the thunder died away--and the lightning did not flash--and the clouds hung motionless--and the waters sunk to their level and remained--and the trees ceased to rock--and the water lilies sighed no more--and the murmur was heard no longer from among them, nor any shadow of sound throughout the vast illimitable desert. And I looked upon the characters of the rock, and they were changed, and the characters were Spleen."

All this was told in the dreary region in Lybia by the borders of the Za?re, where the waters have a sickly and saffron hue. But Poe wrote the word Silence, which I have changed to Spleen. Three of the Chopin scherzi are the very outpourings of a soul charged with the spiritual spleen of this age of disillusionment.

Mr. Krehbiel once wrote, in discussing the question of the re-scoring of the Chopin concertos: "It is more than anything else a question of taste that is involved in this matter and, as so often happens, individual likings, rather than artistic principles, will carry the day."

It is admitted at the outset by all musicians that the orchestrations of the two concertos in E and F minor of Chopin are meagre and conventional, not to say hackneyed.

Written in the pre-Beethoven style they simply rob the piano soli of their incomparable beauty, become a clog instead of an aid, and have done more to prejudice musicians against Chopin than any other compositions he has written. That they were penned by Chopin himself is more than doubtful, as his knowledge of instrumentation was somewhat slender, and the amazing fact will always remain that while his piano compositions are ever fresh and far removed from all that is trite or commonplace, the orchestration of his concertos is irksome and uninteresting to a degree. In both concertos the opening tuttis are long and take off all the cream and richness of the soli that follow.

The tone of the piano can scarcely vie with that of the orchestra, yet in the first movement of the E minor concerto the lovely, plaintive solo of the first subject in E minor is deliberately played through; the audience and the pianist must patiently wait until it is finished and then, like an absurd anti-climax, the piano breaks in, repeating the same story, only dwarfed and colorless in comparison. In the Tausig version of the E minor opening the tutti differs, in that it omits entirely the piano solo, contenting itself after the first theme, with the small secondary subject in E minor that is afterward played by the piano. Then come the rich opening E minor chords on the piano, and we are once more plunged in medias res without further ado.

The orchestral tutti before the piano enters in C major, is in the Tausig version very effective despite the dreaded trombones. It must be admitted that here we get some Meistersinger color which is--so the story runs--because Wagner had a hand in the arrangement. Certainly Tausig submitted it to him for judgment.

The orchestral canvas is broadened, the tints brighter, deeper, richer and offering a better background for the jewelled passage work of the piano.

The brass choir is so balanced as to float the staccato tone of the piano, giving it depth and sonority.

Take for example the horn pedal-point in E, which occurs in the middle of the romanza where the piano has the delicate, crystalline chromatic cadenza of three bars only. What a stroke of genius for Tausig to introduce the brass here! It floats the fairy-like progressions of the solo and in what ethereal hues! But orthodox pianists will say this is not Chopin, and raise their Czerny-hands in horror.

The changes in the piano parts of the first movement of the E minor concerto are effective, they in no sense destroy the integrity of the ideas; where there is a chromatic scale in unison, Tausig breaks it into double sixths and fourths and chordal figures which are not simplifications or mere pyrotechnics but decidedly more "pianistic" and brilliant.

One thing seems to be forgotten in discussing Chopin piano literature--his music is more than abreast of our times. Consider the fantasy, opus 49, the scherzi, the ballades, the sonatas--the two later ones--the ?tudes and it will be seen that the figures are modern even to novelty; that Schumann, Liszt and Rubinstein borrowed, even if they amplified, and Tausig, if he did alter a few details, did not commit a sin against good taste. Carl Tausig of all virtuosi penetrated deeper into the meanings of the Polish tone-poet, interpreting his music in an incomparable manner.

As regards the coda of the first movement of the E minor concerto Tausig simply takes the awkward trill from the left hand and gives it to the 'celli and contrabasso and the piano plays the passage in unison. Most pianists, Rosenthal excepted, acknowledge that the trill is both distracting and ineffective.

The chromatic work at the end of this movement is broad and infinitely more klavierm?ssig than the older version, the piano closing at the same moment with the orchestra, the audience not being compelled to listen to cadences of the Hummel type to the bitter end. The piano part of the second movement is hardly touched by Tausig; it could not be improved, but the orchestration is so spiritualized and so delicately colored that even a purist may not groan in disapproval.

Against the Tausig version of the rondo the war of complaint is frequently raised. "What, he dares to tamper with the very notes, introducing sixteenths where Chopin wrote eighths!" Yes, this is true, but what an improvement! How much brighter and livelier the rhythm sounds; how much more joyful and elastic! and when the piano part enters it is with added zest we listen to its cheerful song. It is a relief too, when the flute and oboe take up the theme, the piano contenting itself with a trill. The other changes in the solo part in this movement are all in admirable taste and effective but they are not easier to play than the original. The movement loses none of its freshness by the additions, while it gains in tone and dignity. The octaves at the end destroy in some degree the euphony but add in brilliancy. It is seldom one hears them played with clearness and lightness; but when pounded out they become distressingly monotonous.

If a concerto is an harmonious relationship between the solo instrument and the orchestra then the Tausig version of the E minor concerto fulfils perfectly the idea. Of course if a poor conductor who wishes to make a scandal out of each tutti takes hold of the work and a mediocre pianist attempts the solo part, critics may indeed carp and say that Tausig has spoiled the concerto with his additions.

The argument that holds good in the case of added accompaniments of Robert Franz to Handel is the same here but best of all remains the unalterable fact that the Tausig version is more effective and what pianist can resist such an argument! Tausig in the E minor and Richard Burmeister in the F minor concerto have given these two works of Chopin a better frame; the picture appears clearer and more beautiful, details becoming more significant making both works better understood.

Mr. Burmeister has not only re-orchestrated the F minor concerto, but his cadenza at the close of the first movement--a cadenza that embodies in an admirable manner the spirit of its themes--in reality supplies a missing coda. There are also some important changes in the last movement. Mr. Krehbiel justly says, Tausig's emendations have greatly added "to the stature of the concerto."

George Mathias has sketched Chopin in a few sincere, exquisite strokes. His alluring, hesitating, gracious, feminine manner and air of supreme distinction are touched upon, and M. Mathias--dear, charming old gentleman, how well I remember him in 1879!--speaks of Chopin's shoulders, held high after the style of the Poles. Chopin often met Kalkbrenner, his antipodes in everything but breeding. Chopin's coat was buttoned high but the buttons were black; Kalkbrenner's were gold. And how Chopin disliked the pompous old pianist, with his airs and stinginess. As Mathias writes with glee of the idea of Chopin's profiting from the instructions of Kalkbrenner:

"Je crois qu'il n'y a eu qu'une le?on de prise," he adds most emphatically.

At Louis Viardot's Chopin met Thalberg, and that great master of the arpeggio and also of one of the finest singing touches ever heard on a keyboard, received with haughty humility the Polish pianist's compliments, not quite believing in their sincerity. Perhaps he was right, for Chopin made mock of his mechanical style when his back was turned; his imitation of the Mo?se fantasy being astoundingly funny, according to Mathias.

"What a jury of pianists," he cries, "in the old days of the Salle Erard! Doehler, Dreyschock, Leopold de Meyer, Zimmerman, Thalberg, Kalkbrenner--how they all curiously examined the Polish black swan, with his original style and extraordinary technique!" A row over Liszt's transcription of Beethoven's Adela?de is mentioned.

And Chopin, pianist? He played as he composed--in an absolutely unapproachable manner. He would doubtless be shocked to hear his music in the hands of some modern Sandow of the keyboard, torn into unmelodic splinters, yet every splinter exhaling a melodic sound under the furious fingers of the misguided pianist. Mathias examines his rubato and settles the much debated question, although Liszt's happy illustration of the unshaken tree with the shimmering leaves, still holds good. Chopin admired Weber. Their natures were alike aristocratic. Once after Mathias had played the noble, chivalrous sonata in A flat Chopin exclaimed:

"Un ange passait dans le ciel."

Mathias first knew Chopin in 1840 in the rue de la Chauss?e d'Antin, 38. The house no longer stands, having been demolished by the cutting of the rue Lafayette. Later he moved to the rue Tronchet, number 5. The house is still there. He occupied the rez-de-chauss?e. The first piece Mathias brought him was by Kalkbrenner and called Une Pens?e de Bellini. Chopin regarded it without horror, then gave the boy the Moscheles studies and the A minor concerto of Hummel. His pupil, Fontana, gave lessons when the master was sick. One day Chopin was ill but received his visitors lying on a couch. Mathias noticed the Carneval of Schumann. It was the first edition, and Chopin on being asked what he thought of the music answered in icy accents as if the work were painful even to know. He could not speak well of music where want of form shocked his classical instincts, so he said as little as possible. And poor old Robert Schumann down in Leipsic pouring out inky rhapsodies over Chopin!

Mathias tells us that Chopin was a simple man--"Je ne veux pas dire simple esprit"--was no critic, was without literary pretensions and not of the intellectual fibre of Liszt or Berlioz. When the aide-de-camp of King Louis Philippe asked him why he did not compose an opera he answered in that small, slightly stifled voice of his: "Ah, M. Le Comte, let me compose piano music; it's all I know how to do."

Bach, Hummel and Field, Mathias says, were his strongest musical influences. You may well imagine his horror if forced to listen to the Ring. A tender-souled creature yet with the fire of a hero in his veins! More masculine, heroic music--free from Liszt's and Wagner's grandiloquence of accent--than the F sharp minor polonaise, some of the ballades, preludes and ?tudes, has yet to be written.

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