In the miscellaneous group of larger compositions, which includes the Ballades, the Scherzos, the Fantasias, the Sonatas, and the Concertos, we find some of Chopin’s greatest musical thoughts. The Ballades are the musical narration of some fanciful tale of love or adventure. Chopin supplied no ‘program,’ and it is probable that he had none in mind when he composed them. But they tease us out of thought, making us supply our own stories for the musical narration. They have the power of compelling the vision of long vistas of half-remembered experiences--the very mood of high romance. The Scherzos show Chopin’s genius playing in characteristic perfection. They are not the ‘fairy scherzos’ of Mendelssohn, but vivid emotional experiences, and Schumann could well say of the first, ‘How is gravity to clothe itself if jest goes about in dark veils?’ Though they seem to be wholly free and fantastical in form, they yet are related to the traditional scherzo, not only in their triple rhythm, but in the general disposition of musical material. Traces of the old two-part song form, in which most of the scherzos of Beethoven were written, are evident, and also of the third part, called the Trio. On the other hand, elaborate transitional passages from one part back to another conceal or enrich the older, simpler form, and in all four there is a coda of remarkable power and fire. The Fantasia in B minor, long and intricate, is one of the most profoundly moving of all Chopin’s works; it leaves the hearer panting for breath, as though he had waked up from an experience which had sapped the energy of his soul. As for the Sonatas and the Concertos, Chopin’s detractors have tried to deny them any particular merit--or any excellence except that of incidental beauties. The assertion will hardly stand. Chopin’s strength was not in large-scale architecture, nor in what we might call ‘formal form.’ But the sonatas and concertos have a way of charming the hearer and freeing his imagination in spite of faulty structure, and one sometimes feels that, had a few more of them been written, they would have created the very standards of form on which they are to be judged. The famous ‘Funeral March’ was interpolated as a slow movement of the B flat minor sonata, with which it is always heard. Liszt’s eulogy of this may seem vainly extravagant to our materialistic time, but it represents exactly what happens to any one foolish enough to try to put into words the emotions stirred up by this wonderful piece.