work as an exercise, we should have to pronounce it a most excellent one.  But the ideal content, which is always estimable and often truly beautiful as well as original, raises it high above the status of an exercise.  The fundamental fault of the Trio lies in this, that the composer tried to fill a given form with ideas, and to some extent failed to do so—­the working-out sections especially testify to the correctness of this opinion.  That the notion of regarding form as a vessel—­a notion oftener acted upon than openly professed—­is a mischievous one will hardly be denied, and if it were denied, we could not here discuss so wide a question as that of “What is form?” The comparatively ineffective treatment of the violin and violoncello also lays the composer open to censure.  Notwithstanding its weaknesses the work was received with favour by the critics, the most pronounced conservatives not excepted.  That the latter gave more praise to it than to Chopin’s previously-published compositions is a significant fact, and may be easily accounted for by the less vigorous originality and less exclusive individuality of the Trio, which, although superior in these respects to the Sonata, Op. 4, does not equal the composer’s works written in simpler forms.  Even the most hostile of Chopin’s critics, Rellstab, the editor of the Berlin musical journal Iris, admits—­after censuring the composer’s excessive striving after originality, and the unnecessarily difficult pianoforte passages with their progressions of intervals alike repellent to hand and ear—­that this is “on the whole a praiseworthy work, which, in spite of some excursions into deviating bye-paths, strikes out in a better direction than the usual productions of the modern composers” (1833, No. 21).  The editor of the Leipzig “Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung,” a journal which Schumann characterises as “a sleepy place,” is as eulogistic as the most rabid Chopin admirer could wish.  Having spoken of the “talented young man” as being on the one hand under the influence of Field, and on the other under that of Beethoven, he remarks:—­

In the Trio everything is new:  the school, which is the neo- romantic; the art of pianoforte-playing, the individuality, the originality, or rather the genius—­which, in the expression of a passion, unites, mingles, and alternates so strangely with that amiable tenderness [Innigkeit] that the shifting image of the passion hardly leaves the draughtsman time to seize it firmly and securely, as he would fain do; even the position of the phrases is unusual.  All this, however, would be ambiguous praise did not the spirit, which is both old and new, breathe through the new form and give it a soul.

I place these criticisms before the reader as historical documents, not as final decisions and examples of judicial wisdom.  In fact, I accept neither the strictures of the one nor the sublimifications of the other, although the confident self-assertion of the former