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Kleczynski, in his two books, gives many valuable hints, and Isidor Philipp has published a set of Exercises Quotidiens, made up of specimens in double notes, octaves and passages taken from the works. Here skeletonized are the special technical problems. In these Daily Studies, and his edition of the Etudes, are numerous examples dealt with practically.
How much stiffness and jerkiness exasperated him may be judged from what Madame Zaleska related to M. Kleczynski. But polite as Chopin generally was, irritation often got the better of him, more especially in later years when bad health troubled him.
Does the finale indicate by its minor key the gayety of a man devoid of hope as the Germans say?" Kleczynski then tells us that a Polish proverb, "A fig for misery," is the keynote of a nation that dances furiously to music in the minor key. "Elevated beauty, not sepulchral gayety," is the character of Polish, of Chopin's music. This is a valuable hint.
We have seen this legend disproved by one who knows. This Polonaise is not as feverish and as exalted as the previous one. It is, as Kleczynski writes, "the type of a war song." Named the Heroique, one hears in it Ehlert's "ring of damascene blade and silver spur." There is imaginative splendor in this thrilling work, with its thunder of horses' hoofs and fierce challengings.
Jean Kleczynski, who is credited with understanding Chopin, himself a Pole and a pianist, thinks that "people have gone too far in seeking in the Preludes for traces of that misanthropy, of that weariness of life to which he was prey during his stay in the Island of Majorca...Very few of the Preludes present this character of ennui, and that which is the most marked, the second one, must have been written, according to Count Tarnowski, a long time before he went to Majorca. ... What is there to say concerning the other Preludes, full of good humor and gaiety No. 18, in E flat; No. 21, in B flat; No. 23, in F, or the last, in D minor?
With the possible exception of the C minor Nocturne, this one in the sombre key of C sharp minor is the great essay in the form. Kleczynski finds it "a description of a calm night at Venice, where, after a scene of murder, the sea closes over a corpse and continues to serve as a mirror to the moonlight." This is melodramatic.
Rubato should be employed, for, as Kleczynski says, "Here everything totters from foundation to summit, and everything is, nevertheless, so beautiful and so clear." But only an artist with velvety fingers should play this sounding arabesque. There is more limpidezza, more pure grace of line in the first Impromptu than in the second in F sharp, op. 36.
Although Karasowski and Kleczynski give to the A flat major Polonaise the honor of suggesting a well-known story, it is really the A major that provoked it so the Polish portrait painter Kwiatowski informed Niecks.
A vivid picture of his method of teaching is given in the lectures on "Frédéric Chopin's Works and Their Proper Interpretation," by the Pole, Jean Kleczynski. The basis of this method consisted in refinement of touch, for the attainment of which a natural, easy position of the hand was considered by Chopin a prime requisite.
The A flat Mazurka, No. 3, is pessimistic, threatening and irritable. Though in the key of E major the trio displays a relentless sort of humor. The return does not mend matters. A dark page! In A minor the fourth is called by Szulc the Little Jew. Szulc, who wrote anecdotes of Chopin and collected them with the title of "Fryderyk Szopen," told the story to Kleczynski.
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