It seems as if in these twenty-four pieces every phase of human emotion were brought out. If my memory is correct, Rubinstein played them as a solo group at a Philharmonic concert, or he may have given them about the same time at one of his recitals. It was in 1872; and while after this long lapse of time it is impossible to remember every detail of his performance, I shall never forget the exquisite tenderness with which he played the very brief Prélude in A major, the seventh. He simply caressed the keyboard, touched it as if his fingers were tipped with velvet; and though into the other compositions of the series he put, according as their character varied, an immense amount of passion, or more subdued emotion, I can still hear this seventh Prélude sounding in my memory, note for note and bar for bar, as he rendered it--a prolonged, tremulous whisper. Schumann regarded the Préludes as most remarkable, saying that "in every piece we find in his own hand 'Frédéric Chopin wrote it.' One recognizes him in his pauses, in his quick-coming breath. He is the boldest, the proudest poet-soul of his time."
Each number in the series is complete in itself, a mood picture; but the series as a whole, in its collection of moods, its panorama of emotions, represents the entire range of Chopin's art. The fourth in E minor, covering only a page, is one of the most pathetic plaints ever penned. The fifteenth in D flat major, with its continual reiteration of the dominant, like the incessant drip of rain on a roof, is a nocturne--Chopin in one of his morbid moments; while the eighteenth in F minor is as bold a piece of dramatic recitative as though it had been lifted bodily out of a music-drama. And so we might run the whole range of the collection, finding each admirable in itself, yet different from all the others. What a group for a recital these twenty-four Préludes make!
If Chopin had not written the Nocturnes I doubt if those who play and those who comment on him would err so often in attributing such an excess of morbidness to him as they do, or lay the charge of effeminacy against him. Morbid these Nocturnes undoubtedly are in many parts, and yet they often rise to the dignity of elegy, and sometimes even of tragedy. Exquisitely melodious they are, too, and full of the haunting mystery of night. The one in C sharp minor, Opus 27, No. 1, is perhaps the most dramatic of the series, and Henry T. Finck, in his Chopin essay, is entirely within bounds when he says that it embodies a greater variety of emotion and more genuine dramatic spirit on four pages than many operas on four hundred. There are greater nocturnes than the one in G, Opus 37, No. 2, but I must nevertheless regard it as the most beautiful of all. It may bewitch and unman the player, as Niecks has said, but, on the other hand, I think its second melody, like a Venetian barcarolle breathed through the moonlight, is the most exquisite thing Chopin ever composed; and note how, without any undulating accompaniment, its rhythm nevertheless produces a gentle wavy effect.