THE WHY OF MUSICThe treatment �the style, or one feature of it �is that of variation, of a kind, anyhow, on those four bars. /. Ingenious variation? F. Not in the sense that you have to hunt for the theme in a lot of intellectual contortions of it. Chopin isn't playing the formal game of variation, and the style would be wrong if he were. This seems to me the right kind of ingenuity for the theme, and the theme is really quite visible �at least until the thirty-seconds begin. /. And thereafter? F. Well, with those the relation to the theme does get more vague. But with a theme only four bars long, obvious variation would soon have appeared mechanical. I confess I can't find the theme in the later figurations; yet, they don't seem to have forgotten it. I suppose the repeated formula in the bass suggests it. And of course, the "singing" becomes florid and pianistic. Even Trilby, whom Svengali hypnotized into singing the A|? Impromptu, couldn't have managed this. But do you mind the extravagance? 7. The piano sang the melody at the beginning, and I can hardly complain if it elaborates it after its own taste. And anyhow it resumes its singing in the quiet Coda, where I suppose you will hear the mother's voice again �singing, or maybe humming? F. I haven't, I find, "seen" the mother very clearly, even at the beginning, and she's no clearer at the end. But the baby goes to sleep quite aff ectingly with those two final chords. 7. Oh! The baby! Was he really there all the time? We didn't even think of him until he went to sleep. F. Ugh! . . . You remind me of a phrase that was current on a radio hour a long time ago: "You nasty man!" . . . You've shattered a cherished �though, I must confess, an already somewhat tarnished �image. 7. Of what? F. I'm not sure, any more. The cradle rocks, and the first phrase of melody is just as gentle and tender as I always thought it; but there just isn't any baby, and I'm afraid there never was �either for Chopin or for me. 7.1 was just as unhappy as you when, one day, the bubble of my illusion burst. But I don't see how we can avoid the conclusion that we've uncovered, for ourselves, anyhow, a beautifully disguised untruth. I can't see that the untruth lies in the style itself, looked at only as style. It is per104
