ABSTRACT
Debates about the aesthetic merits of sketches and, more generally, pieces that display something of the ‘unfinished’ about them were particularly acute in the visual arts. Yet the possibility remains that the ‘rough edges’ of one of Chopin’s sketches might have held some aesthetic value to his associates, just as, in the 1830s, friends of Theodore Rousseau preferred his sketches to his finished canvases. Chopin viewed his sketches as private documents whose notation need make sense only to him, and this particular draft displays some of the scribal shortcuts that he habitually used in such circumstances. Striving to transfer the sounds conceived at the keyboard onto paper, he seldom wasted time writing down aspects of the piece that were obvious to him.
