More positively, taking pleasure in music is the most obvious sign of comprehension, the proof that we understand it, and we may extend that to sympa… - Charles Rosen

In almost every edition (and consequently most performances) of Chopin's Sonata in B flat Minor, Op. 35, there is a serious error that makes awkward nonsense of an important moment in the first movement. The repeat of the exposition begins in the wrong place.

The buffoonery of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart is only an exaggeration of an essential quality of the classical style. This style was, in its origins, basically a comic one.

Technical display in Chopin, after the early works, is transmuted into tone color or dramatic gesture-we may say, to accept the prejudices of Chopin's own generation, that it has been ennobled. This is the source of much of the poetry in Chopin's music: it comes from the transformation of the vulgar into something aristocratic.