Among other manuscripts found on Chopin’s writing-table after his death
was the original of this composition, complete in every detail, but
written across the back, in his own trembling hand, were the words, “To
be destroyed when I am gone.”
It is difficult to account for this injunction, except upon the theory
that he feared that both the form and the content of the work were too
original, too subtle and complex, and too wholly unfamiliar to the
musical world of his day, to be readily comprehended, and that it would
either suffer from incorrect rendition or be condemned and ignored. So
he preferred a quick death by fire for this child of his sad later days,
to a slow death by mutilation or cruel neglect.
Fortunately the request was disregarded by his friends. The work was
published and has become one of his most beloved, as it is one of his
most faultlessly beautiful compositions. The peculiarity of form
referred to is familiar to all who have attempted the study of this
impromptu. The whole first movement, consisting of a continuous rapid
figure of four notes in the right hand against three in the left, is one
of the most unusual and difficult musical problems to solve
satisfactorily, and only to be mastered by long and special practice—a
case, as I have often said, where it is well to remember the biblical
injunction, “let not thy right hand know what thy left hand doeth.” But
when smoothly played, it produces just that sinuous, interwoven, flowing
effect which the composer desired, and which could not have been
obtained, in such perfection, in any other way.
The content of this composition, like that of many of Chopin’s smaller
works, is purely emotional, like a strictly lyric poem, by his literary
counterpart Tennyson, for instance; it is a wholly subjective expression
of a mental state, an emotional condition, not of any scene or any
action. It touches the minor key and sounds the plaintive harmonies to
which his heart-strings were tuned and vibrating at the time when it was
written. It voices a soft summer twilight mood, half sad, half tender,
full of vague regrets, of indefinite longings and aspirations, of
fluttering hope, never destined to be realized, and bright fleeting
memories that rise and pass, dimmed by intervening clouds of sorrow and
disappointment, like the shifting forms and hues of a kaleidoscope seen
through a misty glass, or the luminous phantoms of dead joys and shadowy
suggestions of the “might have been,” against the gray background of a
sad present and an uncertain, promiseless future. It is a strange,
delicately complex mood, a mood of life’s sunset hour, colored by the
pathetic glories of the dying day, and the depressing, yet tranquilizing
shadows of the coming night—a mood well-nigh impossible to express, but
perfectly embodied in the music.
The following simple little verses, in which, as will be seen, has been
made a somewhat free use of the suggestive symbolism of nature, may
serve to illustrate, though by no means to the writer’s satisfaction,
his conception of the artistic significance of this composition: