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It was published November, 1843, and probably composed at Nohant, as a letter of the composer indicates. The dedication is to Princesse C. de Souzzo these interminable countesses and princesses of Chopin! For Niecks, who could not at first discern its worth, it suggests a Titan in commotion. It is Titanic; the torso of some Faust-like dream, it is Chopin's Faust.
Niecks dwells gingerly upon his fervor in love and friendship "a passion with him" and thinks that it gives the key to his life. Of his romantic friendship for Titus Woyciechowski and John Matuszynski- -his "Johnnie" there are abundant evidences in the letters. They are like the letters of a love-sick maiden.
"At the time of the Berlin visit," writes Niecks, his biographer, "Chopin was a lively, well-educated, well-mannered youth, who walked through life, pleased with its motley garb, but as yet unconscious of the deeper truths, the immensities of joy and sadness, of love and hate, which lie beneath the surface."
Yet I cannot help agreeing with Niecks, who writes of it he oddly enough places it in the key of E: "A duet between a He and a She, of whom the former shows himself more talkative and emphatic than the latter, is, indeed, very sweet, but, perhaps, also somewhat tiresomely monotonous, as such tete-a-tetes naturally are to third parties."
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.
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.
Chopin saw her in such moments, too, and, that the recollection might not pass away, for all time fixed her picture in her vivacious moods in the last movement, the Allegro vivace of the concerto, with what Niecks, one of the leading modern biographers of the composer, calls its feminine softness and rounded contours, its graceful, gyrating, dance-like motions, its sprightliness and frolicsomeness.
Of the three the last in F minor is the strongest, although if Chopin's age is taken into consideration, the first, in D minor, is a feat for a lad of eighteen. I agree with Niecks that the posthumous Polonaise, without opus number, in G sharp minor, was composed later than 1822 the date given in the Breitkopf & Hartel edition.
I. The next in F minor has no special physiognomy, while the third in D flat contains, as Niecks points out, germs of the op. 42 and the op. 34 Valses. It recalls to me the D flat study in the supplementary series. The E minor Valse, without opus, is beloved. It is very graceful and not without sentiment. The major part is the early Chopin. The E major Valse is published in the Mikuli edition.
Niecks says it is "a real pandemonium; for a while holier sounds intervene, but finally hell prevails." The study is for Kullak "somewhat far fetched and forced in invention, and leaves one cold, although it plunges on wildly to the end." Von Bulow has made the most complete edition.
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