ges and all
similar ones must be executed discreetly and legatissimo. Notes with
double stems must be distinguished from notes with single stems by
means of stronger shadings, for they are mutually interconnected."

Von Bulow calls the seventh study, the one in C sharp minor, a
nocturne--a duo for 'cello and flute. He ingeniously smooths out the
unequal rhythmic differences of the two hands, and justly says the
piece does not work out any special technical matter. This study is the
most lauded of all. Yet I cannot help agreeing with Niecks, who writes
of it--he oddly enough places it in the key of E: "A duet between a He
and a She, of whom the former shows himself more talkative and emphatic
than the latter, is, indeed, very sweet, but, perhaps, also somewhat
tiresomely monotonous, as such tete-a-tetes naturally are to third
parties."

For Chopin's contemporaries this was one of his greatest efforts.
Heller wrote: "It engenders the sweetest sadness, the most enviable
torments, and if in playing it one feels oneself insensibly drawn
toward mournful and melancholy ideas, it is a disposition of the soul
which I prefer to all others. Alas! how I love these sombre and
mysterious dreams, and Chopin is the god who creates them." In this
etude Kleczynski thinks there are traces of weariness of life, and
quotes Orlowski, Chopin's friend, "He is only afflicted with
homesickness." Willeby calls this study the most beautiful of them all.
For me it is both morbid and elegiac. There is nostalgia in it, the
nostalgia of a sick, lacerated soul. It contains in solution all the
most objectionable and most endearing qualities of the master. Perhaps
we have heard its sweet, highly perfumed measures too often. Its
interpretation is a matter of taste. Kullak has written the most
ambitious programme for it. Here is a quotation from Albert R. Parsons'
translation in Schirmer's edition of Kullak.

Throughout the entire piece an elegiac mood prevails. The
composer paints with psychologic truthfulness a fragment out
of the life of a deeply clouded soul. He lets a broken heart,
filled with grief, proclaim its sorrow in a language of pain
which is incapable of being misunderstood. The heart has
lost--not something, but everything. The tones, however, do not
always bear the impress of a quiet, melancholy resignation.
More passionate impulses awaken, and the still plaint becomes
a complaint against cruel fate. It seeks the confl