of E. Built up by a series of
cunning touches and climaxes and without the mood depth or variety of
its brethren, it is more truly a Scherzo than any of them. It has
tripping lightness and there is sunshine imprisoned behind its open
bars. Of it Schumann could not ask, "How is gravity to clothe itself if
jest goes about in dark veils?" Here, then, is intellectual refinement
and jesting of a superior sort. Niecks thinks it fragmentary. I find
the fairy-like measures delightful after the doleful mutterings of some
of the other Scherzi. There is the same "spirit of opposition," but of
arrogance none. The C sharp minor theme is of lyric beauty, the coda
with its scales, brilliant. It seems to be banned by classicists and
Chopin worshippers alike. The agnostic attitude is not yet dead in the
piano playing world.

Rubinstein most admired the first two Scherzi. The B minor has been
criticised for being too much in the etude vein. But with all their
shortcomings these compositions are without peer in the literature of
the piano.

They were published and dedicated as follows: Op. 20, February, 1835,
to M. T. Albrecht; op. 31, December, 1837, Comtesse de Furstenstein;
op. 39, October, 1840, Adolph Gutmann, and op. 54, December, 1843,
Mile, de Caraman. De Lenz relates that Chopin dedicated the C sharp
minor Scherzo to his pupil Gutmann, because this giant, with a prize
fighter's fist, could "knock a hole in the table" with a certain chord
for the left hand--sixth measure from the beginning--and adds quite
naively: "Nothing more was ever heard of this Gutmann--he was a
discovery of Chopin's." Chopin died in this same Gutmann's arms, and,
despite de Lenz, Gutmann was in evidence until his death as a "favorite
pupil."

And now we have reached the grandest--oh, banal and abused word--of
Chopin's compositions, the Fantaisie in F minor, op. 49. Robert
Schumann, after remarking that the cosmopolitan must "sacrifice the
small interests of the soil on which he was born," notices that
Chopin's later works "begin to lose something of their especial
Sarmatian physiognomy, to approach partly more nearly the universal
ideal cultivated by the divine Greeks which we find again in Mozart."
The F minor Fantaisie has hardly the Mozartian serenity, but parades a
formal beauty--not disfigured by an excess of violence, either personal
or patriotic, and its melodies, if restless by melancholy, are of
surprising nobility and dramatic grandeur. Withou