cult pianoforte passages with their progressions of
intervals alike repellent to hand and ear--that this is "on the whole
a praiseworthy work, which, in spite of some excursions into deviating
bye-paths, strikes out in a better direction than the usual productions
of the modern composers" (1833, No. 21). The editor of the Leipzig
"Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung," a journal which Schumann
characterises as "a sleepy place," is as eulogistic as the most rabid
Chopin admirer could wish. Having spoken of the "talented young man"
as being on the one hand under the influence of Field, and on the other
under that of Beethoven, he remarks:--

In the Trio everything is new: the school, which is the neo-
romantic; the art of pianoforte-playing, the individuality,
the originality, or rather the genius--which, in the
expression of a passion, unites, mingles, and alternates so
strangely with that amiable tenderness [Innigkeit] that the
shifting image of the passion hardly leaves the draughtsman
time to seize it firmly and securely, as he would fain do;
even the position of the phrases is unusual. All this,
however, would be ambiguous praise did not the spirit, which
is both old and new, breathe through the new form and give it
a soul.

I place these criticisms before the reader as historical documents, not
as final decisions and examples of judicial wisdom. In fact, I accept
neither the strictures of the one nor the sublimifications of the other,
although the confident self-assertion of the former and the mystic
vagueness of the latter ought, according to use and wont, to carry
the weight of authority with them. Schumann, the Chopin champion par
excellence, saw clearer, and, writing three years later (1836), said
that the Trio belonged to Chopin's earlier period when the composer
still allowed the virtuoso some privileges. Although I cannot go so far
as this too admiring and too indulgent critic, and describe the work as
being "as noble as possible, more full of enthusiasm than the work
of any other poet [so schwarmerisch wie noch kein Dichter gesungen],
original in its smallest details, and, as a whole, every note music and
life," I think that it has enough of nobility, enthusiasm, originality,
music, and life, to deserve more attention than it has hitherto
obtained.

Few classifications can at one and the same time lay claim to
the highest possible degree of convenience--the raison d'etre of
c