The fact that Chopin in his later works, often omitted the sign for
the pedal on his MSS. must not be held to indicate that he did not
wish it to be constantly used. In his earlier works he carefully
indicated where it should be employed, but subsequently he appears to
have reasoned rightly that a pianist who needs to be told where the
pedal ought, and where it ought not, to be employed, is not
sufficiently advanced in culture to play his works at all, and had
therefore best leave them alone.

Chopin's remarkable genius for divining the mysteries of the
pianoforte enabled him, as it were, to anticipate what is a
comparatively recent invention--the middle pedal which is chiefly used
to sustain single tones in the bass without affecting the rest of the
instrument. The melancholy "F sharp minor Prelude," for example,
cannot be played properly without the use of this middle pedal. In
another prelude, we have an illustration of how the pedal must often
be used in order to help in forming a chord which cannot be stretched.
And this brings us to the second important innovation in the treatment
of Chopin's pianoforte--the constant use of scattered and extended
chords.

Karasovski relates that Chopin, a mere boy, used to amuse himself by
searching on the piano for harmonies of which the constituent notes
were widely scattered on the keyboard, and, as his hands were too
small to grasp them, he devised a mechanism for stretching his hands,
which he wore at night. Fortunately, he did not go so far as Schumann,
who made similar experiments with his hands and thereby disabled one
of them for life. What prompted Chopin to search for these widely
extended chords was his intense appreciation of tonal beauty. To-day
everybody knows how much more beautiful scattered, and widely extended