oes Klindworth,
although F sharp may be found in some editions. On the last page,
second bar, first line, Kullak writes the passage beginning with E flat
in eighth notes, Klindworth in sixteenths. The close is very striking,
full of the splendors of glancing scales and shrill octave
progressions. "It would inspire a poet to write words to it," said
Robert Schumann.

"Perhaps the most touching of all that Chopin has written is the tale
of the F major Ballade. I have witnessed children lay aside their games
to listen thereto. It appears like some fairy tale that has become
music. The four-voiced part has such a clearness withal, it seems as if
warm spring breezes were waving the lithe leaves of the palm tree. How
soft and sweet a breath steals over the senses and the heart!"

And how difficult it seems to be to write of Chopin except in terms of
impassioned prose! Louis Ehlert, a romantic in feeling and a classicist
in theory, is the writer of the foregoing. The second Ballade, although
dedicated to Robert Schumann, did not excite his warmest praise. "A
less artistic work than the first," he wrote, "but equally fantastic
and intellectual. Its impassioned episodes seem to have been afterward
inserted. I recollect very well that when Chopin played this Ballade
for me it finished in F major; it now closes in A minor." Willeby gives
its key as F minor. It is really in the keys of F major--A minor.
Chopin's psychology was seldom at fault. A major ending would have
crushed this extraordinary tone-poem, written, Chopin admits, under the
direct inspiration of Adam Mickiewicz's "Le Lac de Willis." Willeby
accepts Schumann's dictum of the inferiority of this Ballade to its
predecessor. Niecks does not. Niecks is quite justified in asking how
"two such wholly dissimilar things can be compared and weighed in this
fashion."

In truth they cannot. "The second Ballade possesses beauties in no way
inferior to those of the first," he continues. "What can be finer than
the simple strains of the opening section! They sound as if they had
been drawn from the people's store-house of song. The entrance of the
presto surprises, and seems out of keeping with what precedes; but what
we hear after the return of tempo primo--the development of those
simple strains, or rather the cogitations on them--justifies the
presence of the presto. The second appearance of the latter leads to an
urging, restless coda in A minor, which closes in the same key