This Etude can be described as a toccata for the right hand, flourising in repeated thirds and sixths, creating a rich polyphony in one hand.

For Vladimir Horowitz this etude was too difficult to play.

Moscheles wrote in his diary: "I like to employ some free hours in the evening in making myself acquainted with Chopin's studies and his other compositions, and find much charm in the originality and national colouring of their motivi; but my fingers always stumble over certain hard, inartistic, and to me incomprehensible modulations, and the whole is often too sweetish for my taste, and appears too little worthy of a man and a trained musician. I am a sincere admirer of Chopin's originality; he has furnished pianists with matter of the greatest novelty and attractiveness. But personally I dislike the artificial, often forced modulations; my fingers stumble and fall over such passages; however much I may practise them, I cannot execute them without tripping. "