Chopin--they once called him
amateurish in his harmonies!--could do what he pleased in the
contrapuntal line.

Shall I continue? Shall I insist on the obvious; hammer in my truisms!
It may be possible that out here on the Wissahickon--where the summer
hiccoughs grow--that I do not get all the news of the musical world. Yet
I vainly scan piano recital programs for such numbers as those C-sharp
minor mazurkas, for the _F minor Ballade_, for that beautiful and
extremely original _Ballade Op. 38_ which begins in F and ends in A
minor. Isn't there a legend to the effect that Schumann heard Chopin
play his _Ballade_ in private and that there was no stormy middle
measures? I've forgotten the source, possibly one of the greater
Chopinist's--or _Chopine_-ists, as they had it in Paris. What a
stumbling-block that A minor explosion was to audiences and students
and to pianists themselves. "Too wild, too wild!" I remember hearing the
old guard exclaim when Rubinstein, after miraculously prolonging the
three A's with those singing fingers of his, not forgetting the pedals,
smashed down the keyboard, gobbling up the sixteenth notes, not in
phrases, but pages. How grandly he rolled out those bass scales, the
chords in the treble transformed into a _Cantus Firmus_. Then, his
Calmuck features all afire, he would begin to smile gently and lo!--the
tiny, little tune, as if children had unconsciously composed it at play!
The last page was carnage. Port Arthur was stormed and captured in every
bar. What a pianist, what an artist, what a _man_!

I suppose it is because my imagination weakens with my years--remember
that I read in the daily papers the news of Chopin's death! I do long
for a definite program to be appended to the _F-major Ballade_. Why not
offer a small prize for the best program and let me be judge? I have
also reached the time of life when the _A-flat Ballade_ affects my
nerves, just as Liszt was affected when a pupil brought for criticism
the _G minor Ballade_. Preserve me from the _Third Ballade_! It is
winning, gracious, delicate, capricious, melodic, poetic, and what not,
but it has gone to meet the _D-flat Valse_ and _E-flat Nocturne_--as
the obituaries say. The fourth, the _F minor Ballade_--ah, you touch me
in a weak spot. Sticking for over a half century to Bach so closely, I
imagine that the economy of thematic material and the ingeniously spun
fabric of this _Ballade_ have made it my pet. I do not dwell upon the