The etude-whose technical end is the rapid execution of widely extended chord figurations exceeding the span of an octave-is to be played on the basis of forte throughout.
"Chopin: The Man and His Music"
James Huneker
Beethoven has furnished the immortal type of what I may call emotional, sentimental music-it unites all the separate and peculiar constituents of the earlier essentially naive types; sustained and interrupted tone, cantilena and figurations, are no longer kept formally asunder-the manifold changes of a series of variations are not merely strung together, but are now brought into immediate contact, and made to merge one into the other.
"On Conducting (Ueber das Dirigiren): A Treatise on Style in the Execution of Classical Music"
Richard Wagner (translated by Edward Dannreuther)