Overview
Introduction
This is the 1840 version of a study later reworked in 1852 with the title Ab Irato (‘In a rage’). The less assuming but more cumbersome title of the present version—composed, along with studies by such as Mendelssohn and Chopin for the famous piano manual of Moscheles and Fetis—reads in full: Morceau de salon—Étude deperfectionnement de la Méthode des Méthodes. This athletic little piece has a brief lyrical moment towards the coda (in the 1852 version the pace is slowed at this point) which bears only the most accidental and distant relationship to a theme from the symphonic poem Les Préludes—it seems a pity that some commentators have sought to establish a closer link—but which derives, in fact, from the group of three notes, now rising, now falling, which inform the whole work.
