-Pieces for different instruments).]
On April 10 of that year Chopin writes that he expects it impatiently.
The appearance of these Variations, the first work of Chopin published
outside his own country, created a sensation. Of the impression which
he produced with it on the Viennese in 1829 enough has been said in the
preceding chapter. The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung received no less
than three reviews of it, two of them--that of Schumann and one by "an
old musician"--were accepted and inserted in the same number of the
paper (1831, Vol. xxxiii., No. 49); the third, by Friedrich Wieck,
which was rejected, found its way in the following year into the musical
journal Caecilia. Schumann's enthusiastic effusion was a prophecy rather
than a criticism. But although we may fail to distinguish in Chopin's
composition the flirting of the grandee Don Juan with the peasant-girl
Zerlina, the curses of the duped lover Masetto, and the jeers and
laughter of the knavish attendant Leporello, which Schumann thought
he recognised, we all obey most readily and reverently his injunction,
"Hats off, gentlemen: a genius!" In these words lies, indeed, the merit
of Schumann's review as a criticism. Wieck felt and expressed nearly
the same, only he felt it less passionately and expressed it in the
customary critical style. The "old musician," on the other hand, is
pedantically censorious, and the redoubtable Rellstab (in the Iris)
mercilessly condemnatory. Still, these two conservative critics, blinded
as they were by the force of habit to the excellences of the rising
star, saw what their progressive brethren overlooked in the ardour
of their admiration--namely, the super-abundance of ornament and
figuration. There is a grain of truth in the rather strong statement
of Rellstab that the composer "runs down the theme with roulades, and
throttles and hangs it with chains of shakes." What, however, Rellstab
and the "old musician"--for he, too, exclaims, "nothing but bravura and
figuration!"--did not see, but what must be patent to every candid and
unprejudiced observer, are the originality, piquancy, and grace of these
fioriture, roulades, &c., which, indeed, are unlike anything that
was ever heard or seen before Chopin's time. I say "seen," for the
configurations in the notation of this piece are so different from those
of the works of any other composer that even an unmusical person could
distinguish them from all the rest; and there is none