A pianist hardly can go amiss in making his selection from the twenty-seven Études, for the contrasts which he can effect are obvious, and there is among these compositions not one which has not its special merits. There is the tenth, of which Von Bülow said whoever could play it in a really finished manner might congratulate himself on having climbed to the highest point of the pianist's Parnassus, and that the whole repertory of music for the pianoforte does not contain a study of perpetual motion so full of genius and fancy as this especial one is universally acknowledged to be, excepting, possibly, Liszt's "Feux Follets." Then there is number nineteen in C sharp minor, like a nocturne with the melody in the left hand, with the right hand answering as a flute would a 'cello. For contrast take number twenty-one, the so-called "Butterfly Étude"--a wretched misnomer, because a pianist gifted with true musical clairvoyance can work up such a gust of passion in this Étude that any butterfly would be swept away as if by a hurricane. Nor, in order to accomplish this, is it necessary to make such a bravura piece of the Étude as so many pianists ignorantly do. We have, too, the "Winter Wind Étude," in A minor, Opus 25, number eleven--the twenty-third in the collection as usually published--planned on a grand scale and carried out in a manner equal to the plan.
Von Bülow calls attention to the fact that, with all its sonorousness, "the greatest fullness of sound imaginable," it nowhere trespasses upon the domain of the orchestra, but remains pianoforte music in the strictest sense of the word. "To Chopin," says Von Bülow, in referring to this Étude, "is due the honor and credit of having set fast the boundary between piano and orchestral music which, through other composers of the romantic school, especially Robert Schumann, has been defaced and blotted out, to the prejudice and damage of both species." While agreeing with Von Bülow that Chopin was the great liberator of the pianoforte, I cannot agree with the exception he takes to the music of Robert Schumann. If he had referred back to the unpianistic classical sonata form, he would have been more accurate.
I have gone into some detail regarding these Études because I regard them, as a whole, among the greatest of Chopin's works. But I once heard Rubinstein play the entire set of twenty-four Préludes, and I sometimes wonder, as one often does with the compositions of a great genius, whether these Préludes, in spite of their comparative brevity, should not be ranked as high as anything Chopin ever wrote. According to tradition, they were composed during the winter of 1838, which Chopin spent with George Sand at Majorca in the Balearic Islands. But there is authority for saying that they received only the finishing touches there, and are in fact the gleanings of his portfolios.