Chopin Etude Op. 10 No. 3

[jazzyprof]

I'm new to the forum...my first post!

I've been working on the Chopin Etude Op. 10 No.3.  I get to bar 41 and the left hand is going down chromatically.  The last two notes in the upper LH voice are written as G# and F# in the Henle Urtext edition that I'm using.  I feel that G# and F## would be more logical given the foregoing chromatic descent.  So I just checked a couple of other editions.  The Cortot edition indeed has F## and a Dover edition (edited by Karl Mikkuli, a student of Chopin's) has the same note F##(notated as G natural).  The descending chromatic sequence does end with a B major chord at the beginning of the next bar so the  F sharp in the preceding chord would make it a V chord resolving to a I, while the F double sharp would make it a diminished chord.  I have two questions:
(1)  What note do most pianists play here, F# or F##?
(2)  What did Chopin actually write down in the original manuscript?

Thanks!

[janice]

I have G# and F# in my edition.  I have the E. Robert Schmitz' edition.  I'm not sure that this edition is in circulation anymore. Before each etude, there is 2 pages of explanatory text.  One page is in English, the other in French.  Does anybody know anything about this edition?

Hope this helps!

[allchopin]

I have always played G# F#.  But here, this should answer your question - this is one of the early editions from Chopin's manuscripts.
https://chopin.lib.uchicago.edu/gsdl/cgi-bin/library?e=d-000-00---0chopin--00-0-0-0prompt-10---4---Document-dpr--0-1l--1-en-Zz-1---50-home-10--001-001-1-0utfZz-8-0&a=d&cl=search&d=CHOP050.13

[jazzyprof]

allchopin, thank you for the link to an early edition of the Chopin Etudes.  You led me to a very valuable resource.  Upon further research I found that Chopin often kept making changes to his works even afrter they had been published and that sometimes he would send several variants of the same piece to different publishers!  So I suspect a definitive answer to the question I posed may not exist.  I quote here from an article by Jeffrey Kallberg: "If Chopin allowed multiple versions of his pieces to appear in print during his lifetime, then we should respect this attitude in our own approaches to this music. For Chopin as a composer (and as a performer, for that matter), music was a fluid, not fixed, concept. This explains why, in nearly every source he touched, he continued to compose, to revise, to cut. Variants are not a "problem" to be solved. Rather they reflect an essential aspect of Chopin's art."
https://www.chopin.pl/biografia/prtw_en.html

Personally I'm inclined to go with the G# to F## for the following reasons:
(1) If part of the intent of this particular etude is to teach legato playing, then the G# to F## is much easier to play legato (using the 2-5, 1-4 fingering in the LH.)  In fact one can smoothly alternate 1-4, 2-5 starting from the B-F at the end of the first beat in measure 41.  The G# to F# feels somewhat awkward and hard to play legato uunless one starts with thumb on G#.
(2) It feels better under the fingers and sounds better to my ears.
(3)  K. Mikuli was Chopin's student and teaching assistant so his edition (with the G#, F##) probably contains what Chopin actually taught to his students.  (Pure speculation on my part!)