Light, graceful, dainty, capricious, full of playful tenderness and
delicate fancy is this little work, written for and presented as a
wedding gift to one of his favorite pupils, La Comtesse de Lobau, to
whom it is dedicated. The first movement embodies the joyous, hopeful,
congratulatory spirit of the occasion, expressed with all that refined
elegance and polished perfection of style of which Chopin was so
preëminently the master, both in music and language. It is the most
unqualifiedly optimistic strain from his pen with which I am acquainted.
The trio, in F minor, brings a touch of half-veiled sadness and
irrepressible regret, as if called forth by the thought that their art
work together is now to end. She has been for years one of his most
talented, diligent, and interesting students. She is, like himself, a
Polish exile in a foreign land, and their community of sympathies and
sorrows, combined with her charming personality and congenial
temperament, have tended to merge the relations of teacher and pupil
into the closer bonds of a life-long friendship. He is naturally
reluctant to lose her, but this mood of depression is soon subordinated
to the thought that she has found the philosopher’s stone, the fabled
blue flower of the German poets, the subtile, yet supreme panacea for
all human ills—love. This idea is expressed in the last half of the
trio as only Chopin could express it; and the work ends with a
repetition of the first strain, brightly, happily, with a certain
restful completeness of fulfilled desire in the reiterated closing
chords.