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Who will not recall the memorable passage in the A flat Ballade, where the right hand alone takes up the dotted eighths after the sustained chord of the sixth of A flat? Could a lover's confusion be more deliciously enhanced by silence and hesitation?" Ehlert above evidently sees a ballroom picture of brilliancy, with the regulation tender avowal.
"The banking-house of Ebenstreit, founded under the name of Ludwig, associated with Ehlert of Amsterdam, four months since, to buy and load ships for the Calcutta market. Herr Ebenstreit gathered together the last wrecks of his fortune remaining from his ruinous speculations, to win enormously in this investment.
"The house of Ehlert, in Amsterdam, has failed; the principal has fled with the coffers; the notes for eighty thousand dollars were protested, and you, baron, must pay this sum to-day, or declare yourself a bankrupt, and go to prison for debt." Instantaneously a suppressed cry and a laugh were heard.
The elegiac imprint is unmistakable in this soul dance. The A flat Valse which follows is charming. It is for superior souls who dance with intellectual joy, with the joy that comes of making exquisite patterns and curves. Out of the salon and from its brilliantly lighted spaces the dancers do not wander, do not dance into the darkness and churchyard, as Ehlert imagines of certain other valses.
The true narrative tone is in this symmetrically constructed Ballade, the most spirited, most daring work of Chopin, according to Schumann. Louis Ehlert says of the four Ballades: "Each one differs entirely from the others, and they have but one thing in common their romantic working out and the nobility of their motives.
Slender in technical configuration, yet it impressed Louis Ehlert so much that he was impelled to write: "A more perfect canon in the octave could not have been written by one who had grown gray in the learned arts." The four Mazurkas, published posthumously in 1855, that comprise op. 67 were composed by Chopin at various dates.
And even the late Louis Ehlert, in his appreciative essay on Chopin, comes to the conclusion that Chopin is certainly not to be ranked with such giants as Bach and Beethoven. This is Teutonism, pure and simple. No doubt Chopin is, in some respects, inferior to Bach and Beethoven, but in other respects he is quite as unquestionably superior to them.
Ehlert is one of the few sympathetic German Chopin commentators, yet he did not always indicate the salient outlines of his art. Only the Slav may hope to understand Chopin thoroughly. But these Ballades are more truly touched by the universal than any other of his works. They belong as much to the world as to Poland.
Heymann was not, however, to begin teaching at the Frankfort Conservatory until the following autumn, so MacDowell remained in Wiesbaden, studying composition and theory with the distinguished critic and teacher, Louis Ehlert, while his mother returned to America.
It cannot be denied that the pupils turned out by the average vocal teachers are quite unable to sing a Franz or even a Schubert song correctly and with proper emotional expression. Now, it is evident, as Ehlert says, that "that art of singing which abides with the bel canto and is unable to sing Bach, Beethoven, and Schumann, has not attained to the height of their period.
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