Leopold Godowsky, the Polish-born piano virtuoso who made his career in America, was an outstanding technician of the piano, and restudied many aspects of playing, especially improving left-hand technique. Also famous for numerous piano transcriptions, he amplified and extended many of Chopin's etudes to create this set of 53 almost surreal transformations of them between 1900 and 1914, when he was touring Europe and teaching in Berlin. As if Chopin's originals weren't difficult enough, Godowsky adds additional parts, compounds the rhythms, sharpens the harmonies, superimposes one Chopin etude on top of another. Godowsky considered his purpose to expand the range of the piano to more complex textures, particularly as regards tone color, in addition to developing the mechanics and art of piano playing for the student of the set. He was careful to note that the original 26 Chopin etudes still existed, untouched and unspoiled by his alterations. Twenty-two of the Godowsky studies are for the left hand alone, and these, in particular, are revolutionary in their fingering. This music is so difficult that it has defeated many pianists' efforts to learn and present them as recital pieces. Taken simply as music, listening to them is a strange, almost Ivesian experience, as Chopin's familiar music floats as if wrapped in a sea foam of unexpected additional notes, sometimes altering the musical feeling to something like Impressionism, sometimes bizarrely contrasting one or two etudes with each other or with other rhythmic and musical ideas. All the while, the aware listener is bowled over as much by the sheer audacity of the concept as by the transcendent difficulty of the music.

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