plets obscure their retreat with
chromatic vapors. Then an adagio in this fantastic old world tale--the
curtain prepares to descend--a faint, sweet voice sings a short,
appealing cadenza, and after billowing A flat arpeggios, soft, great
hummocks of tone, two giant chords are sounded, and the Ballade of Love
and War is over. Who conquers? Is the Lady with the Green Eyes and Moon
White Face rescued? Or is all this a De Quincey's Dream Fugue
translated into tone--a sonorous, awesome vision? Like De Quincey, it
suggests the apparition of the empire of fear, the fear that is
secretly felt with dreams, wherein the spirit expands to the drummings
of infinite space.

Alas! for the validity of subjective criticism. Franz Liszt told
Vladimir de Pachmann the programme of the Fantaisie, as related to him
by Chopin. At the close of one desperate, immemorial day, the pianist
was crooning at the piano, his spirits vastly depressed. Suddenly came
a knocking at his door, a Poe-like, sinister tapping, which he at once
rhythmically echoed upon the keyboard, his phono-motor centre being
unusually sensitive. The first two bars of the Fantaisie describe these
rappings, just as the third and fourth stand for Chopin's musical
invitation, entrez, entrez! This is all repeated until the doors wide
open swinging admit Liszt, George Sand, Madame Camille Pleyel nee Mock,
and others. To the solemn measures of the march they enter, and range
themselves about Chopin, who after the agitated triplets begins his
complaint in the mysterious song in F minor. But Sand, with whom he has
quarrelled, falls before him on her knees and pleads for pardon.
Straightway the chant merges into the appealing A flat section--this
sends skyward my theory of its interpretation--and from C minor the
current becomes more tempestuous until the climax is reached and to the
second march the intruders rapidly vanish. The remainder of the work,
with the exception of the Lento Sostenuto in B--where it is to be hoped
Chopin's perturbed soul finds momentary peace--is largely repetition
and development. This far from ideal reading is an authoritative one,
coming as it does from Chopin by way of Liszt. I console myself for its
rather commonplace character with the notion that perhaps in the
re-telling the story has caught some personal cadenzas of the two
historians. In any case I shall cling to my own version.

The F minor Fantaisie will mean many things to many people. Chopin has