"Hats off gentlemen, a new genius!" – Schumann on Chopin
Frederick Chopin wrote lots and lots and lots of music for the piano. As a matter of fact, nearly all of his music was written for piano. Why?, you might ask. Well, in a nutshell, he was very very good at it as well as being a virtuoso pianist. These factors combined to make him something of a piano specialist, you might say. Oh, and he was Polish, not French. Born Fryderyk Chopin near Warsaw to a French father in 1810, he was an ardent Polish nationalist all his life and this is readily apparent in his music. That life, however, was to be extremely short; he was a sickly youngster and his health was always dubious. As an adult, he suffered from TB for many long years before it claimed his life in 1849.
While he was alive, the piano was the undisputed supreme force in the instrumental kingdom. This was, after all, the era of Franz Liszt who is regarded as probably its greatest ever practitioner. But whereas Liszt was a born showman and delighted in dazzling his audiences with seemingly impossible pyrotechnics, Chopin had a naturally withdrawn and pensive personality. His music is simple, direct, and deliberate, with plenty of opportunities for expression and rubato. It reminds me more of singing, as opposed to Liszt’s frantic, dervish-like dancing. That’s not to say that Chopin's music is easy to play – as a matter of fact, it is downright difficult. But it is often derided for the basic nature of the left hand parts (Chopin had a predilection for focusing intense emotion into the melody and treating left hand on the piano as an accompaniment), or the lack of a specific significance ie nearly all the music of the Romantic era was linked to an intention on the composer’s part, be in the form of a programme or a relationship with the title, or even through association with a story the composer told, or an episode in their private life.
Chopin is best known for his smaller pieces: his 24 preludes, written on Majorca in 1838; his highly emotional nocturnes, his etudes, which force the student to focus on presentation and musical thought as much as on technique; his waltzes, and of course his homage to his beloved homeland; the Mazurka’s (a Polish dance, sort of like a deranged waltz) and the Polonaise, which is also a dance but a seems a lot less drunk. But he also wrote two very impressive concerti (for, you guessed it, piano), three piano sonatas – the second of which contains a very famous funeral march – and Ballades, which are essentially tone-poems. A good example of his limited range of chamber music can be heard if you get a chance to listen to his g minor sonata for ‘Cello and Piano, written for August Franchomme, a very famous ‘cellist of the day.
Chopin had a long and tempestuous affair with George Sand. To avoid a certain degree of almost inevitable confusion, George Sands was the nom de plume of novelist Aurore Dudevant. They no doubt inspired one another at the time, but apparently she wasn’t a very nice lady when all came to all and after she dumped him in 1847 he more or less ceased composing. Interesting 'drop in conversation' type fact: despite the fact that Frederick was regarded as a piano virtuoso, he only ever gave about 30 recitals, many of which were private affairs for rich French people.
Recommended Recording: Anything by Martha Argerich.
Lorcan MacMuiris
