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Notwithstanding the grandeur and beauty of the grave, the power and passion of the scherzo, this Sonata in B flat minor is not more a sonata than it is a sequence of ballades and scherzi. And again we are at the de Maupassant crux. The work never could be spared; it is Chopin mounted for action and in the thick of the fight.
As he was on the point of ringing the bell, an idiotic terror seized him, and he fled down the stairs, four steps at a time, Gérard and Pétrus after him, shouting with laughter. But the third attempt was successful. Gautier saw Victor Hugo and lived. The author of Odes et Ballades was just twenty-eight years old. Youth worshiped youth in those great days.
On one occasion eleven competitors made a ballade on the idea, These eleven ballades still exist; and one of them arrests the attention rather from the name of the author than from any special merit in itself.
Notwithstanding such later creations as the fourth "Ballade," Op. 52, the "Barcarolle," Op. 60, and the "Polonaise," Op. 53, it can hardly be said that the composer surpassed in his subsequent works those which he had published in recent years, works among which were the first three ballades, the preludes, and a number of stirring polonaises and charming nocturnes, mazurkas, and other pieces.
This was when Jehan Negre, the Lombard, came to Blois and played chess against all these chess-players, and won much money from my lord and his intimates; or when Baudet Harenc of Chalons made ballades before all these ballade-makers. ChampoIlion-Figeac, 381, 361, 381. Champollion-Figeac, 359,361. It will not surprise the reader to learn they were all makers of ballades and rondels.
His Polonaises, Ballades, Scherzi and Etudes need a mighty grip, a grip mental and physical. Chopin met Czerny. "He is a good man, but nothing more," he said of him. Czerny admired the young pianist with the elastic hand and on his second visit to Vienna, characteristically inquired, "Are you still industrious?"
Of this capital achievement and, with it, of Villon's style in general, it is here the place to speak. The LARGE TESTAMENT is a hurly-burly of cynical and sentimental reflections about life, jesting legacies to friends and enemies, and, interspersed among these many admirable ballades, both serious and absurd.
Schumann relates also that the poems of Mickiewicz incited Chopin to write his ballades, which information he got from the Polish composer himself. It is a questioning thought that, like a sudden pain, shoots through mind and body. And now the story-teller begins his simple but pathetic tale, heaving every now and then a sigh.
His literary success opened to him the doors of diplomacy. He was successively attache of the Legation at Florence, Secretary of Embassy at Naples and at London, Charge d'Affaires in Tuscany. When the Revolution of 1830 broke out, he had just been named Minister Plenipotentiary to Greece. Victor Hugo published his Odes et Ballades from 1822 to 1828.
Anton Rubinstein, when I last heard him, played Chopin inimitably. Never shall I forget the Ballades, the two Polonaises in F sharp minor and A flat major, the B flat minor Prelude, the A minor "Winter Wind" the two C minor studies, and the F minor Fantasie. Yet the Chopin pupils, assembled in judgment at Paris when he gave his Historical Recitals, refused to accept him as an interpreter.
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