"It is neither too fresh in feeling nor so spontaneous in utterance as its companions. There is a touch of the faded, blase, and it is hardly healthy in sentiment. The absence of simplicity is counterbalanced by greater freedom of modulation and complexity of pattern. The impromptu flavour is not missing, and there is allied to its delicacy of design a strangeness of sentiment, that strangeness which Poe declared should be a constituent element of all great art."
Just a cursory glance at this music's measures conveys something more fleeting than the glance itself, and I feel little here of the morbidity too readily felt by James Huneker and others before him. Considered the least known of Chopin's Impromptus, it is perhaps one of the more richer shades in the spectrum of colours of the major flat keys. A shade a tone less than the first Impromptu, it is in both motion and mood no less exuberant. Nieck's observation that the morbidezza is anything but healthy, seems sick-roomly in the extreme. Indeed, the opening measures of this Impromptu are so simliar to those of the Impromptu in Ab - at one point the pattern of notes is identical - that one seems almost born of the other.
A little further on, had it been Wagner who penned measures 19-25, Andre Gide might not have been so quick to dismiss him, but there is little of the oratorical here, and the incomparable thread of Chopin's thought, so reduced to only what is essential, so concentrated and significant, is something Wagner could only ever hope to achieve.
There is certainly something more air-born about this Impromptu than any of the others, and whereas in the first Impromptu, Chopin's fancy took form, in this his third Impromptu, it truly takes flight.
PHILLIP WILCHER
August 2002
(Article published by Music Teacher Magazine)
