achmann,
essays the _G-flat major Impromptu_--wrongfully catalogued as _Des Dur_
in the Klindworth edition? To be sure, it resumes many traits of the two
preceding _Impromptus_, yet is it none the less fascinating music. And
the _Mazurkas_--I refuse positively to discuss at the present writing
such a fertile theme. I am fatigued already, and I feel that my antique
vaporings have fatigued you. Next month I shall stick to my leathery
last, like the musical shoemaker that I am--I shall consider to some
length the use of left-hand passage work in the Hummel sonatas. Or shall
I speak of Chopin again, of the Chopin mazurkas! My sour bones become
sweeter when I think of Chopin--ah, there I go again! Am I, too, among
the rhapsodists?

VI

MORE ANENT CHOPIN

I had fully intended at the conclusion of my last chapter to close the
curtain on Chopin and his music, for I agree with the remark Deppe once
made to Amy Fay about the advisability of putting Chopin on the shelf
for half a century and studying Mozart in the interim. Bless the dear
Germans and their thoroughness! The type of teacher to which Deppe
belonged always proceeded as if a pupil, like a cat, had nine lives.
Fifty years of Chopin on the shelf! There's an idea for you. At the
conclusion of this half century's immurement what would the world say to
the Polish composer's music? That is to say, in 1955 the unknown
inhabitants of the musical portion of this earth would have sprung upon
them absolutely new music. The excitement would be colossal, colossal,
too, would be the advertising. And then? And then I fancy a chorus of
profoundly disappointed lovers of the tone art. Remember that the world
moves in fifty years. Perhaps there would be no longer our pianoforte,
our keyboard. How childish, how simple would sound the timid little
Chopin of the far-away nineteenth century.

In the turbulent times to come music will have lost its personal flavor.
Instead of interpretative artists there will be gigantic machinery
capable of maniacal displays of virtuosity; merely dropping a small coin
in a slot will sound the most abstruse scores of Richard Strauss--then
the popular and bewhistled music maker. And yet it is difficult for us,
so wedded are we to that tragic delusion of earthly glory and artistic
immortality, to conjure up a day when the music of Chopin shall be stale
and unprofitable to the hearing. For me the idea is inconceivable. Some
of his music has lost int