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It has Italian color in spots Schumann said that, melodically, Chopin sometimes "leans over Germany into Italy" and is a masterly one in sentiment, pulsating with amorousness. To me it sounds like a lament for the splendors, now vanished, of Venice the Queen. In bars 8, 9, and 10, counting backward, Louis Ehlert finds obscurities in the middle voices. It is dedicated to the Baronne de Stockhausen.
This B minor Scherzo has the acid note of sorrow and revolt, yet the complex figuration never wavers. The walls stand firm despite the hurricane blowing through and around them. Ehlert finds this Scherzo tornadic. It is gusty, and the hurry and over-emphasis do not endear it to the pianist.
Louis Ehlert, speaking of Chopin's F Major ballad, says he has seen even children stop in their play and listen to it enraptured. But, in the études I mentioned a moment ago, there are melodies which, I should think, would tempt even angels to leave their happy home and indulge, for a moment, in the luxury of idealized human sorrow.
And how difficult it seems to be to write of Chopin except in terms of impassioned prose! Louis Ehlert, a romantic in feeling and a classicist in theory, is the writer of the foregoing. The second Ballade, although dedicated to Robert Schumann, did not excite his warmest praise. "A less artistic work than the first," he wrote, "but equally fantastic and intellectual.
I do not care much for the F major Nocturne, op. 15, No. I. The opus is dedicated to Ferdinand Hiller. Ehlert speaks of "the ornament in triplets with which he brushes the theme as with the gentle wings of a butterfly," and then discusses the artistic value of the ornament which may be so profitably studied in the Chopin music. "From its nature, the ornament can only beautify the beautiful."
Were it not for what I have ventured to call the fetish of Jumboism, I am convinced that Professor Ehlert would have written Mozart's name in this last sentence in place of Clementi's.
Ehlert, who thought that Heymann was not the man for me, spoke and wrote to Von Bulow about me; but the latter, without even having seen me, wrote Ehlert a most insulting letter, asking how Ehlert dared 'to propose such a silly thing' to him; that he was not a music teacher, and could not waste his time on an American boy, anyway. So, after all, I went to Frankfort and entered the conservatory."
"The Preludes follow out no technical idea, are free creations on a small basis, and exhibit the musician in all his versatility," says Louis Ehlert. "No work of Chopin's portrays his inner organization so faithfully and completely. Much is embryonic. It is as though he turned the leaves of his fancy without completely reading any page.
It does not present the frank physiognomy of the second Scherzo, op. 31, in B flat minor. Ehlert cries that it was composed in a blessed hour, although de Lenz quotes Chopin as saying of the opening, "It must be a charnel house." The defiant challenge of the beginning has no savor of the scorn and drastic mockery of its fore-runner.
"Beethoven was scarce more vehement and irritable," writes Ehlert. And we remember the stories of friends and pupils who have seen this slender, refined Pole wrestling with his wrath as one under the obsession of a fiend. It is no desire to exaggerate this side of his nature that impels this plain writing. Chopin left compositions that bear witness to his masculine side.
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