Lento, ma non troppo

Bonus track twenty-four ended with the brook’s turn to sing. Bonus track twenty-five ends the album.

The facts. Bonus track twenty-five runs four minutes and eight seconds. It is Fryderyk Chopin’s Étude in E major, Op. 10 No. 3. The credit changes one last time: Arr. Garrett / Haywood for Violin, Piano, Guitar & Orchestra, with Julien Quentin, Franck van der Heijden, Orchestra the Prezent and John Haywood conducting.

Chopin writes it in 1832. In 1833 it is published as the third of his twelve studies for the piano, Op. 10, dedicated to Franz Liszt. In Paris, Schlesinger brings them out in June.

On Chopin’s manuscript the tempo is Vivace: lively. On the copy prepared for the French edition it is Vivace ma non troppo.

In print it becomes Lento ma non troppo: slow, but not too slow.

Vivace → Lento.

Chopin made the change only for the printed edition.

“Tristesse” is not Chopin’s title. Critics gave it that name later, and another one too, “L’Adieu”.

In 1939 Tino Rossi sang it as a French song, Tristesse. In 1950 it became an American popular song, No Other Love.

Chopin’s pupil Adolf Gutmann studied the étude with him. According to Frederick Niecks, writing in 1888, Chopin told Gutmann he had never written another such beautiful melody.

Once, while Gutmann was studying it, Chopin raised his clasped hands and cried out:

O, my homeland. Chopin had left Poland in 1830, and he never went back.

Track twenty said the answer can be a place.

On Garrett’s repertoire list, Chopin means a Nocturne, on Music. The Étude has one recording against it: Immortal.

This series has asked the same question twenty-five times: what carries music past the people who made it?

The last answer is the simplest. Somebody plays it again.

Chopin wrote Vivace, printed Lento, and never called it Tristesse. Nearly two hundred years later it closes an album called Immortal.

Thank you for walking with us, one track at a time.

Immortal — David Garrett for Deutsche Grammophon — from 9 October 2026: 20 tracks in the standard edition, 25 in the deluxe, on digital, CD and vinyl, on Deutsche Grammophon. One track at a time, we keep walking through it.

Sources & notes: the album credit as listed for the deluxe edition by Universal Music; the composition, publication, dedication and tempo markings from the reference literature on the étude (after Jan Ekier’s National Edition commentaries); the names “Tristesse” and “L’Adieu” and No Other Love from the reference literature on the étude; Tino Rossi’s Tristesse from MusicBrainz; the Gutmann anecdote from Frederick Niecks, Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician (1888); Garrett’s recordings from david-garrett.com.