crux.  The work never could be spared; it is Chopin mounted for action and in the thick of the fight.  The doppio movimento is pulse-stirring—­a strong, curt and characteristic theme for treatment.  Here is power, and in the expanding prologue flashes more than a hint of the tragic.  The D flat Melody is soothing, charged with magnetism, and urged to a splendid fever of climax.  The working out section is too short and dissonantal, but there is development, perhaps more technical than logical—­I mean by this more pianistic than intellectually musical—­and we mount with the composer until the B flat version of the second subject is reached, for the first subject, strange to say, does not return.  From that on to the firm chords of the close there is no misstep, no faltering or obscurity.  Noble pages have been read, and the scherzo is approached with eagerness.  Again there is no disappointment.  On numerous occasions I have testified my regard for this movement in warm and uncritical terms.  It is simply unapproachable, and has no equal for lucidity, brevity and polish among the works of Chopin, except the Scherzo in C sharp minor; but there is less irony, more muscularity, and more native sweetness in this E flat minor Scherzo.  I like the way Kullak marks the first B flat octave.  It is a pregnant beginning.  The second bar I have never heard from any pianist save Rubinstein given with the proper crescendo.  No one else seems to get it explosive enough within the walls of one bar.  It is a true Rossin-ian crescendo.  And in what a wild country we are landed when the F sharp minor is crashed out!  Stormy chromatic double notes, chords of the sixth, rush on with incredible fury, and the scherzo ends on the very apex of passion.  A Trio in G flat is the song of songs, its swaying rhythms and phrase-echoings investing a melody at once sensuous and chaste.  The second part and the return to the scherzo are proofs of the composer’s sense of balance and knowledge of the mysteries of anticipation.  The closest parallelisms are noticeable, the technique so admirable that the scherzo floats in mid-air—­Flaubert’s ideal of a miraculous style.

And then follows that deadly Marche Funebre!  Ernest Newman, in his remarkable “Study of Wagner,” speaks of the fundamental difference between the two orders of imagination, as exemplified by Beethoven and Chopin on the one side, Wagner on the other.  This regarding the funeral marches of the three.  Newman finds Wagner’s the more concrete imagination; the “inward picture” of Beethoven, and Chopin “much vaguer and more diffused.”  Yet Chopin is seldom so realistic; here are the bell-like basses, the morbid coloring.  Schumann found “it contained much that is repulsive,” and Liszt raves rhapsodically over it; for Karasowski it was the “pain and grief of an entire nation,” while Ehlert thinks “it owes its renown to the wonderful effect of two triads, which in their combination possess a highly tragical element.  The middle movement is not at all characteristic.  Why could it not at least have worn second mourning?  After so much black crepe drapery one should not at least at once display white lingerie!” This is cruel.