fingering. The Chopin studies are poems fit for
Parnassus, yet they also serve a very useful purpose in pedagogy. Both
aspects, the material and the spiritual, should be studied, and with
four such guides the student need not go astray.

In the first study of the first book, op. 10, dedicated to Liszt,
Chopin at a leap reached new land. Extended chords had been sparingly
used by Hummel and Clementi, but to take a dispersed harmony and
transform it into an epical study, to raise the chord of the tenth to
heroic stature--that could have been accomplished by Chopin only. And
this first study in C is heroic. Theodore Kullak writes of it: "Above a
ground bass proudly and boldly striding along, flow mighty waves of
sound. The etude--whose technical end is the rapid execution of widely
extended chord figurations exceeding the span of an octave--is to be
played on the basis of forte throughout. With sharply dissonant
harmonies the forte is to be increased to fortissimo, diminishing again
with consonant ones. Pithy accents! Their effect is enhanced when
combined with an elastic recoil of the hand."

The irregular, black, ascending and descending staircases of notes
strike the neophyte with terror. Like Piranesi's marvellous aerial
architectural dreams, these dizzy acclivities and descents of Chopin
exercise a charm, hypnotic, if you will, for eye as well as ear. Here
is the new technique in all its nakedness, new in the sense of figure,
design, pattern, web, new in a harmonic way. The old order was
horrified at the modulatory harshness, the young sprigs of the new,
fascinated and a little frightened. A man who could explode a mine that
assailed the stars must be reckoned with. The nub of modern piano music
is in the study, the most formally reckless Chopin ever penned. Kullak
gives Chopin's favorite metronome sign, 176 to the quarter, but this
editor rightly believes that "the majestic grandeur is impaired," and
suggests 152 instead. The gain is at once apparent. Indeed Kullak, a
man of moderate pulse, is quite right in his strictures on the Chopin
tempi, tempi that sprang from the expressively light mechanism of the
prevailing pianos of Chopin's day. Von Bulow declares that "the
requisite suppleness of the hand in gradual extension and rapid
contraction will be most quickly attained if the player does not
disdain first of all to impress on the individual fingers the chord
which is the foundation of each arpeggio;" a sound ped