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Updated: May 28, 2025
Topsy-turvied as are the figures, a Chopin, even if lop-sided, hovers about, sometimes with eye-brows uplifted, sometimes with angry, knitted forehead and not seldom amused to the point of smiling. You see his narrow shoulders, shrugged in the Polish fashion as he examines the study in double-thirds transposed to the left hand!
An idea prevalent as it seems in our Europe of old . . . the idea that when a witch in animal form is wounded, say by a blow or a shot, the natural wound will appear on the human body when the witch returns to her own person. But I have topsy-turvied in my tale. I saw the lion with my own eyes, his shaggy head haloed by the rising moon. The Mashona who was with me had far sharper eyes than mine.
Turn a parable upside down, and nearly everything falls out of it. Even the beautiful legend of the prodigal son returning home to his parents could not retain its value when it was topsy-turvied by the Thropps. Their son was a daughter, but she had run away from them to batten on the husks of city life, and had prospered exceedingly.
Again play him lawlessly, with his accentual life topsy-turvied, and he is no longer Chopin his caricature only. Pianists of Slavic descent alone understand the secret of the tempo rubato. I have read in a recently started German periodical that to make the performance of Chopin's works pleasing it is sufficient to play them with less precision of rhythm than the music of other composers.
This learned and worthy doctor astonished the musical world a few years by his new marks of phrasing in the Beethoven symphonies. They topsy-turvied the old bowing. With Chopin, new dynamic and agogic accents are rather dangerous, at least to the peace of mind of worshippers of the Chopin fetish. Riemann breaks two bars into one.
I wish, since it is too late, and my lot determined, that I had not had this letter, nor heard him take my part to that vile woman; for then I should have blessed myself in having escaped so happily his designing arts upon my virtue: but now my poor mind is all topsy-turvied, and I have made an escape to be more a prisoner.
The effect was strangely irritating to the nerves, and reminded me of a tornado seen from the wrong end of an opera glass. According to his own lights the Russian virtuoso was right: his strength was not equal to the task, and so, imitating Chopin, he topsy-turvied the shading.
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