Few composers are as closely identified with a single instrument as Chopin is with the piano. His fellow virtuoso Liszt characterized him as “one of those original beings” who roam freely in the musical landscape, “adrift from all bondage.” Arriving in Paris from his native Poland in 1831, the 21-year-old pianist and composer threw himself into the city’s glittering social and musical life, turning out dozens of waltzes, mazurkas, nocturnes, and other solo piano pieces that gave new meaning and substance to the term “salon music,” the lightweight fare popular in Parisian drawing rooms of the 1830s and 1840s.
An observer who heard Chopin play in his prime captured the phenomenal range of his technique, as well as his highly strung temperament: “His delicate and slender hands cover wide stretches and skips with a fabulous lightness, and his finger agility is so marvelous that I am ready to believe the amusing story that he has been seen to put his foot around his neck! ... His pianissimo is so delicate that he can produce the greatest effects of crescendo without requiring the strength of the muscular virtuosi of the modern school, and he produces marvels of nuance by the use of the pedal, both pedals together, and by his unique legato.” Equally extraordinary was Chopin’s prowess as an improviser: “His inspiration is so immediate and complete that he plays without hesitation as if it had to be thus. But when it comes to writing it down and recapturing the original thought in all its details, he spends days of nervous strain and almost frightening desperation.”
Liszt was already well established in the French capital when he attended Chopin’s debut recital at the Salle Pleyel in February 1832. (The program included the Don Giovanni Variations that we’ll hear tonight.) Renowned for his “transcendental” keyboard technique, the charismatic Hungarian would take Europe by storm over the next two decades. As audiences in city after city succumbed to “Lisztomania,” his name became synonymous with virtuosity and showmanship. Yet in 1848, at the height of his fame, he virtually retired from the concert stage and devoted the rest of his life to composing, conducting, and proselytizing (with his future son-in-law, Richard Wagner) for the “Music of the Future.”
Born in 1810, a year before Liszt, Chopin graduated at age 19 from the High School of Music in Warsaw, where he was singled out for his “musical genius” partly on the strength of this brilliantly virtuosic Rondo “in the mazurka style.” The recurring rondo melody in F major is characterized by the distinctive lilt of the mazurka, a triple-meter Polish folk dance that Chopin would explore further in the 60-odd mazurkas that he composed up to the last year of his life. Robert Schumann praised Op. 5 to the heavens, saying that “whoever does not yet know Chopin would be well advised to begin with this piece.”
Chopin is often credited with inventing the genre of the instrumental “ballad,” which was taken up and popularized later in the century by Liszt, Brahms, Grieg, and other composers. Previously, the term had been reserved almost exclusively for vocal music. In Chopin’s lexicon, ballade retained its literary associations, in keeping with the Romantic interest in program music. But despite Debussy’s bon mot that “Chopin was a delightful teller of tales of love and war,” the composer known as the “poet of the piano” was more interested in evoking generalized moods and emotions than specific stories. Written between the mid-1830s and the early 1840s, the four Ballades represent Chopin at the height of his powers. The works share an essentially tripartite (A-B-A) structure featuring two contrasting themes, as in classical sonata form. Moreover, all four are written in the lilting sextuple meter (6/8 or 6/4) often associated with narrative-style musical works. The F-Major Ballade opens with a gently lapping, barcarolle-like melody in 6/8 time that is soon interrupted by a coruscating torrent of 16th notes. These two competing ideas collide, interpenetrate, and eventually come together in a peaceful synthesis.
Chopin wrote this bravura set of variations for piano and orchestra while he was still studying in Warsaw. “Là ci darem la mano” is the beguiling duet in which Don Giovanni attempts to seduce Zerlina, the naïve peasant girl, in the first act of Mozart’s opera. The unpretentious crowd-pleaser—which Chopin often performed as a piano solo—would be his passport out of Poland. In the summer of 1829, he traveled to Vienna with several of his former classmates. There his future publisher arranged for him to perform the Variations at the prestigious Theater am Kärntnertor. “Everyone clapped so loudly after each variation that I had difficulty hearing the orchestral tuttis,” Chopin crowed to his family. “At the end they applauded so loudly that I had to come back twice and bow.” Two years later, Schumann launched Chopin’s international career with a rave review of the Mozart Variations that included the immortal line: “Hats off, gentlemen—a genius.”
Chopin took umbrage at Schumann’s literary-minded interpretation of the Variations as a faithful musical re-enactment of Mozart’s seduction scene. According to Schumann, he told a friend incredulously, “They are not ordinary variations but a fantastic tableau,” adding, “I could die laughing at this German’s imagination.” Yet there is no denying the operatic flavor of Chopin’s music, which owes much of its sparkle and elegance to the florid embellishments of bel canto vocalism. The lengthy Introduction ruminates at leisure on the opening phrase of Mozart’s melody, showcasing the lacy textures and richly embroidered lines that had already become Chopin’s stock-in-trade. After presenting the full theme in its pristine simplicity, Chopin subjects it to a series of five intricately figured variations. The minor-key fifth variation, replete with dramatic flourishes and flutterings, leads to the final “Alla polacca,” in which Mozart’s square-cut tune is transformed into a swaggering, triple-time Polish dance.
The second of Chopin’s three piano sonatas had a complicated gestation. The third movement, the lugubrious “Funeral March” from which the Sonata takes its traditional name, Sonate funèbre, dates from 1837, when the highly strung composer was on the rebound from a thwarted love affair with a young Polish woman. He wrote the other three movements two years later, in the first flush of his tempestuous liaison with the French novelist George Sand. In light of this welter of emotions, it’s no wonder that the disparate parts of the B-flat–Minor Sonata don’t coalesce into a tidy package. Indeed, no less a critic than Schumann judged Chopin’s work borderline incoherent, writing: “That he should have called it a ‘sonata’ suggests a joke, if not sheer bravado. He seems to have taken four of his most unruly children and put them together, possibly thinking to smuggle them, as a sonata, into company where they might not be considered individually presentable.”
The Sonata opens with a dramatic, tonally disorienting leap downward from unison D-flats to E-naturals, a harbinger of the “willful and disordered progressions” that Schumann found so “difficult to decipher.” This ponderous preamble gives way to music of a nervously twitching, faintly demonic character, featuring the interval of a minor third, which Chopin contrasts and combines with a broad, consolatory melody. The Scherzo stages a similarly titanic struggle between discordant and ultimately irreconcilable forces, one fueled by a driving, repeated-note pattern, the other a lyrical, gently rocking theme, as relaxed and tender as a lullaby. Further contrasts lie in store in the Marche funèbre, its trudging, earthbound outer sections framing a beatific vision of eternal peace. Then, almost as an afterthought, Chopin brings his enigmatic Sonata to a close with a short etude in sprinting triplets, as airy and insubstantial as the wind.
In the late 1830s, Chopin (along with Liszt, Felix Mendelssohn, and other composers) contributed three études de perfectionnement (“improving etudes”) to a widely used piano method book published in Paris. More than technical studies, the Trois nouvelles études are designed to illustrate and inculcate the technical prowess that underlay Chopin’s distinctive pianism. For instance, the Etude in A-flat Major juxtaposes two simple ideas—triplet chords in the right hand against walking eighth notes in the bass. The trick is to synchronize the two patterns without sacrificing the rhythmic elasticity that is the essence of Chopin’s rubato style.
In 1841, Liszt told his lover Marie d’Agoult that he was “working like a madman at some tremendous fantasies. Norma, La sonnambula, Freischütz, Maometto, Moïse, and Don Juan will be ready in five or six days. It is a new vein I have found and want to exploit. The effect these latest productions make is vastly superior to my previous things.” Liszt’s operatic “paraphrases” are not only virtuoso showpieces, but also works of genuine homage. In his “reminiscences” of Mozart’s Don Giovanni (aka Don Juan), he presents a well-rounded portrait of the opera’s protagonist as, variously, doomed reprobate, wily seducer, and warm-hearted bon vivant. He begins by alluding to the Don’s two portentous encounters with the slain Commendatore in
Act II, the first in the gloomy graveyard, the second in his own banquet hall. No sooner has a musical whirlwind sucked the unrepentant sinner down to hell than Liszt abruptly switches gears in a scintillating rhapsody on the duet “Là ci darem la mano.” The third, climactic section of the piece is based on the Don’s effervescent Champagne Aria, “Fin ch’han dal vino,” which, according to one contemporary account, Liszt played “with such bravura, and at so hurtling a tempo, that one could hardly breathe.”
—Harry Haskell