osition floating
enigmatically in thin air. It deliciously colors the close, leaving a
sense of suspense, of anticipation which is not tonally realized, for
the succeeding number is in a widely divorced key. But it must have
pressed hard the philistines. And this prelude, the twenty-third, is
fashioned out of the most volatile stuff. Aerial, imponderable, and
like a sun-shot spider web oscillating in the breeze of summer, its
hues change at every puff. It is in extended harmonics and must be
delivered with spirituality. The horny hand of the toilsome pianist
would shatter the delicate, swinging fantasy of the poet. Kullak points
out a variant in the fourteenth bar, G instead of B natural being used
by Riemann. Klindworth prefers the latter.

We have reached the last prelude of op. 28. In D minor, it is
sonorously tragic, troubled by fevers and visions, and capricious,
irregular and massive in design. It may be placed among Chopin's
greater works: the two Etudes in C minor, the A minor, and the F sharp
minor Prelude. The bass requires an unusual span, and the suggestion by
Kullak, that the thumb of the right hand may eke out the weakness of
the left is only for the timid and the small of fist. But I do not
counsel following his two variants in the fifth and twenty-third bars.
Chopin's text is more telling. Like the vast reverberation of monstrous
waves on the implacable coast of a remote world is this prelude.
Despite its fatalistic ring, its note of despair is not dispiriting.
Its issues are larger, more impersonal, more elemental than the other
preludes. It is a veritable Appassionata, but its theatre is cosmic and
no longer behind the closed doors of the cabinet of Chopin's soul. The
Seelenschrei of Stanislaw Przybyszewski is here, explosions of wrath
and revolt; not Chopin suffers, but his countrymen. Kleczynski speaks
of the three tones at the close. They are the final clangor of
oppressed, almost overthrown, reason. After the subject reappears in C
minor there is a shift to D flat, and for a moment a point of repose is
gained, but this elusive rest is brief. The theme reappears in the
tonic and in octaves, and the tension becomes too great; the
accumulated passion discharges and dissolves in a fierce gust of double
chromatic thirds and octaves. Powerful, repellant, this prelude is
almost infernal in its pride and scorn. But in it I discern no vestige
of uncontrolled hysteria. It is well-nigh as strong, rank and hum