Frédéric Chopin is so closely associated with the culture and society of mid–19th-century Paris that it’s easy to forget he lived there, on and off, for less than two decades. Born in 1810, he graduated at age 19 from Warsaw’s High School of Music. Eager to make his mark and emboldened by his teachers’ praise of his “exceptional talent” and “musical genius,” he struck out to conquer Europe and eventually landed in the French capital, where he would make his home for the remainder of his short but impactful career. Chopin 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 to the term “salon music,” the lightweight fare popular in Parisian drawing rooms of the 1830s and 1840s.
In recent years, scholars have devoted much effort to uncovering the roots of Chopin’s art in his native Poland and exploring his relationship with the Polish émigré community in Paris. In particular, his friendship with the exiled poet Adam Mickiewicz, a fervent nationalist, fortified his enthusiasm for Polish independence in the wake of the abortive uprising against Russian rule in 1830. Chopin manifested an independent streak in music as well as politics: His radically unconventional conception of the piano, and his unique blend of Classical discipline and Romantic freedom, made him one of the authentically revolutionary figures in music history. His fellow virtuoso Franz Liszt memorably characterized him as “one of those original beings” who roam freely across the musical landscape, “adrift from all bondage.”
Although Chopin’s art was firmly grounded in tradition—Bach and Mozart were his compositional lodestars—it’s startling to reflect that he achieved artistic maturity less than a decade after the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert; the gulf that separates his music from theirs runs so deep that it almost marks the boundary of a separate world. Schumann, himself a master of Romantic character pieces, extolled Chopin’s accomplishment, writing, “imagination and technique share dominion side by side.” In later years, Debussy and many other composers built on the Polish master’s innovations in the realms of harmony, melody, and piano figuration.
Few composers are as closely identified with a single instrument as Chopin is with the piano. The 21-year-old “poet of the piano” took Paris by storm from the moment he arrived there in 1831. Contemporary accounts of his playing vividly attest to his phenomenal powers. One ear-witness marveled at Chopin’s effortless arpeggios, “which swelled and diminished like waves in an ocean of sound.” Another recalled how the pianist’s apparently delicate hands “would suddenly expand and cover a third of the keyboard. It was like the opening of the mouth of a serpent about to swallow a rabbit whole.” Another observer who heard Chopin play in his prime captured the phenomenal range of his technique and his abilities with improvisation, 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 ... 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. He alters and retouches the same phrases incessantly and walks up and down like a madman.
By the time Chopin composed the first of his Op. 10 Etudes in 1830, exercise-type works designed to introduce students to various aspects of the keyboard repertoire abounded in the pedagogical literature. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Clavier-Übung (Keyboard Practice), for instance, offered a comprehensive guide to mid–18th-century styles, genres, and forms, while Daniel Gottlob Türk’s Clavierschule (Keyboard School) surveyed contemporary performance practice and music theory. The systematization of music education in the early 19th century, emanating largely from the prestigious Paris Conservatoire, fed a growing market for method books focusing specifically on piano technique, some of which, like the foundational exercises by Chopin’s Austrian friend Carl Czerny, are still widely used today.
Although Chopin was largely self-taught as a pianist, one of his teachers in Warsaw, Václav Würfel, published a collection of 24 etudes in each of the major and minor keys that may have served as a model for Chopin’s own Preludes, Op. 28. With the ascendancy of virtuoso pianists like Liszt in the early 1800s, the line between didactic technical studies and crowd-pleasing pyrotechnical showpieces became increasingly blurred. The new genre of “concert etudes” was epitomized by Liszt’s Transcendental Études, whose daunting—indeed, almost unprecedented— difficulty bear out his claim to have “transcended” the limitations of both traditional pianistic technique and the instrument itself. American pianist Leopold Godowsky later upped the ante by composing a set of even more gobsmacking virtuosic studies based on Chopin’s etudes. More recent collections of concert etudes, such as those by Claude Debussy and György Ligeti, reflect the enduring influence of Chopin’s miniatures as both teaching tools and artistic statements.
In the late 1830s, Chopin—along with Liszt, Mendelssohn, and other composers—contributed three “études de perfectionnement” (“improving etudes”) to a widely used piano method book published in Paris. More than mere exercises, the Trois nouvelles études (Three New Etudes) were designed to develop the sensibility and technical facility that underlay Chopin’s distinctive style of pianism. On a basic level, each of the three etudes tests the pianist’s powers of rhythmic coordination. The first, in F minor, sets a single melodic line consisting of quarter notes in groups of three against undulating eighth-note arpeggios. (In musical parlance, this is called playing “three against four.”) The D-flat–Major Etude is an exercise in two against three: This time the right hand plays fast-moving triplet chords while the left hand limns the changing harmonies in spare eighth-note duplets. The A-flat–Major Etude plays with similar rhythmic ideas, but thicker chordal textures, melodic ornaments, and metrical ambiguity add an extra dollop of difficulty and complexity. In all three pieces, the trick is to synchronize the contrasting patterns in the two hands without sacrificing the rhythmic elasticity that is the essence of Chopin’s rubato style.
Chopin’s last three etudes were among a cluster of highly sophisticated exercise-like pieces into which he channeled much of his creative energy during the 1830s. In part, this activity was a natural outgrowth of the private teaching by which the composer earned his living. But Chopin’s etudes and preludes rise far above the level of student pieces to explore uncharted realms of musical expression and pianistic technique. Unlike the 24 Preludes, Op. 28, which were conceived as an organic whole and descend directly from Bach’s Das wohltemperirte Clavier (The Well-Tempered Clavier), the 12 Etudes, Op. 10, were never intended to be a unified cycle. Nevertheless, they have many elements in common. The stormy cataract of arpeggios in No. 1 gives way to slithering chromatic runs in No. 2 and serene, nocturne-like lyricism in No. 3; that all three are marked legato is consistent with Chopin’s conception of “a well-formed technique” as one that “can control and vary a beautiful sound quality.” Indeed, a singing tone and sustained legato line are fundamental to virtually all 12 etudes; No. 9 is exceptional in featuring detached staccato articulation. Pedal technique is another of Chopin’s recurring preoccupations, whether to buoy the dancing triplets of No. 5, to anchor the swirling passagework of No. 8, or to link the sonorous rolled chords of No. 11. The set reaches a brilliant climax in the C-minor turbulence of No. 12, aptly nicknamed (though not by Chopin) the “Revolutionary” Etude.
In his second set of a dozen etudes, Chopin again casts aside the constraints of Classical form, harmony, key relationships, and pianism. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of these jewel-like miniatures is their extreme economy of expression. In each piece, Chopin goes straight to the meat of the matter, eschewing extraneous preliminaries or musical filler. The development of his ideas is radically compressed, yet each of the etudes contains a world of meaning. (One of Chopin’s greatest interpreters, the pianist Hans von Bülow, actually invented detailed dramatic “programs” for each of the Op. 28 Preludes.) The Op. 25 Etudes begin and end with exercises in arpeggios, No. 1 delicate and harp-like (hence its unofficial nickname, “Aeolian Harp”), No. 12 roiling and tempestuous. All 12 etudes are predominantly fast except No. 7, by far the longest of the set, an oasis of calm that tests the pianist’s powers of sustained lyricism and flexible rubato rhythm governed by a persistent eighth-note pulse. Nos. 2 and 3 form a minor-major pair, focusing on cross-rhythms and contrary motion, respectively, while Nos. 4 and 5 feature leaping staccato figures and playfully dissonant broken chords. The slow centerpiece is flanked by studies in thirds (No. 6) and sixths (No. 8), while Nos. 9 and 10 offer different perspectives on octave motion. Perhaps most dazzling of all is No. 11, popularly known as “Winter Wind,” with its lumbering, lugubrious melody buffeted by gusts of chromatic passagework that fly like the wind.
—Harry Haskell