Do you know the _E major Scherzo, Op. 54_, with its skimming, swallowlike flight, its delicate figuration, its evanescent hintings at a serious something in the major trio? Have you ever heard Pachmann _purl_ through this exquisitely conceived, contrived and balanced composition, truly a classic? _Whaur_ is your Willy Mendelssohn the _noo_? Or are you acquainted with the _G-sharp minor Prelude_? Do you play the _E-flat Scherzo_ from the _B minor Sonata_? Have you never shed a furtive tear--excuse my old-fashioned romanticism--over the bars of the _B major Larghetto_ in the same work? [The last movement is pure passage writing, yet clever as only Chopin knew how to be clever without being offensively gaudy.]
How about the first _Scherzo in B minor_? You play it, but do you understand its ferocious irony? [Oh, author of _Chopin: the Man and his Music_, what sins of rhetoric must be placed at your door!] And what of the _E-flat minor Scherzo_? Is it merely an excuse for blacksmith art and is the following _finale_ only a study in unisons? There is the _C-sharp minor Prelude_. In it Brahms is anticipated by a quarter of a century. The _Polonaise in F-sharp minor_ was damned years ago by Liszt, who found that it contained pathologic states. What of it? It is Chopin's masterpiece in this form and for that reason is seldom played in public. Why? My children, do you not know by this time that the garden variety of pianoforte virtuoso will play difficult music if the difficulties be technical not emotional, or emotional and not spiritual?
_The F-sharp minor Polonaise_ is always _drummed_ on the keyboard because some silly story got into print about Chopin's aunt asking the composer for a picture of his soul battling with the soul of his pet foe, the Russians. Militant the work is not, as swinging as are its resilient rhythms: granted that the gloomy repetitions betray a morbid dwelling upon some secret, exasperating sorrow; but as the human soul never experiences the same mood _twice_ in a lifetime, so Chopin never means his passages, identical as they may be, to be repeated in the same mood-key. Liszt, Tausig, and Rubinstein taught us the supreme art of color variation in the repetition of a theme. Paderewski knows the trick; so do Joseffy and Pachmann--the latter's _pianissimi_ begin where other men's cease. So the accusation of tonal or thematic monotony should not be brought against this _Polonaise_. Rather let us blame our imperfect sympathies and slender stock of the art of _nuance_.