ian in all his versatility," says
Louis Ehlert. "No work of Chopin's portrays his inner organization so
faithfully and completely. Much is embryonic. It is as though he turned
the leaves of his fancy without completely reading any page. Still, one
finds in them the thundering power of the Scherzi, the half satirical,
half coquettish elegance of the Mazurkas, and the southern, luxuriously
fragrant breath of the Nocturnes. Often it is as though they were small
falling stars dissolved into tones as they fall."

Jean Kleczynski, who is credited with understanding Chopin, himself a
Pole and a pianist, thinks that "people have gone too far in seeking in
the Preludes for traces of that misanthropy, of that weariness of life
to which he was prey during his stay in the Island of Majorca...Very
few of the Preludes present this character of ennui, and that which is
the most marked, the second one, must have been written, according to
Count Tarnowski, a long time before he went to Majorca. ... What is
there to say concerning the other Preludes, full of good humor and
gaiety--No. 18, in E flat; No. 21, in B flat; No. 23, in F, or the
last, in D minor? Is it not strong and energetic, concluding, as it
does, with three cannon shots?"

Willeby in his "Frederic Francois Chopin" considers at length the
Preludes. He agrees in the main with Niecks, that certain of these
compositions were written at Valdemosa--Nos. 4, 6, 9, 13, 20 and
21--and that "Chopin, having sketches of others with him, completed the
whole there, and published them under one opus number. ... The
atmosphere of those I have named is morbid and azotic; to them there
clings a faint flavor of disease, a something which is overripe in its
lusciousness and febrile in its passion. This in itself inclines me to
believe they were written at the time named."

This is all very well, but Chopin was faint and febrile in his music
before he went to Majorca, and the plain facts adduced by Gutmann and
Niecks cannot be passed over. Henry James, an old admirer of Madame
Sand, admits her utter unreliability, and so we may look upon her
evidence as romantic but by no means infallible. The case now stands:
Chopin may have written a few of the Preludes at Majorca, filed them,
finished them, but the majority of them were in his portfolio in 1837
and 1838. Op. 45, a separate Prelude in C sharp minor, was published in
December, 1841. It was composed at Nohant in August of that year. It is
de