In Search of Chopin

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2004 by Mullen, Alexandra

"HATS OFF, GENTLEMEN! A genius!" So Robert Schumann famously declared when he first heard the twenty-two-year-old Polish pianist Fryderyk Chopin play the piano in Paris. Those doffed hats suggest public display, but of all the great composers, surely Chopin is the most intimate. Professionals, connoisseurs, amateurs, and just-plain-audiences all agree here. But it is nonetheless worthwhile to pause to think why so many of us find it to be so.

Partly it's the small scale of so many of his pieces. My local ADD-beset classical music radio station loves to fill its tiny slots with a single Chopin prelude or mazurka or etude or waltz-leaving aside that Minute Waltz, almost all are about two or three minutes long. Every now and then they stretch to a nocturne (average running time: five minutes) or polonaise (around six minutes), but seldom a ballade (close to ten). It's possible, I suppose, for these short pieces to get blended into the Muzak of Mozaldi. But I find that Chopin's works leave a deeper and more intense impression than any other short pieces I know.

But it's not just the scatty-minded Zeitgeist that attunes us to Chopin. We're also responding to the real intimacy of Chopin's original performances. He hated large halls. Part of his distaste stemmed from a combination of his consumption and crowds: "The crowd intimidates me and I feel asphyxiated by its eager breath, paralyzed by its inquisitive stare, silenced by its alien faces," he wrote Liszt. But he had artistic reservations as well: "My playing will be lost in such a large room, and my compositions will be ineffective." Most of his performances were private, intimate, in the salons of friends and aristocratic patrons. His dedications to them still appear at the top of his music: musical friends such as Schumann, Liszt, and Liszt's lover Marie d'Agoult; and an international group of Mesdames les Comtesses and Princesses: Mostowska, Rothschild, de Noailles, Thun-Hohenstein. His performances were often freely given late at night, off-the-cuff, with an improvisatory air. He gave each private roomful of people the impression of playing just for them, for the evanescent mood their conversation had made.

These conditions suited Chopin's style of playing the piano. Everyone who heard him play commented on the delicacy of his touch, the subtlety and responsiveness he drew from the piano. Berlioz, no pianist, didn't like Chopin's music-making much, but he has left an evocative description of its physical intimacy.

There are incredible details in his mazurkas, and he has found how to make them doubly interesting by playing them with the utmost degree of gentleness, with a superlative softness. The hammers just graze the strings so that the hearer is tempted to draw near the instrument and strain his ear, as though he were at a concert of sylphs and will-o'-the-wisps.

(The whizbang pianist Sigismond Thalberg also had an ambiguous response to Chopin's playing. Once, after a Chopin recital, he began shouting out loud in the street. His explanation: "I've been listening to piano all the evening, and now, for the sake of contrast, I want a little forte." Chopin returned the compliment, noting dryly that Thalberg produced "piano with the pedal instead of with the hand.")

The intimacy and spontaneity of Chopin's salon performances are deeply embedded in their written compositions. For of course those qualities are partly illusions. There is no doubt that Chopin was a brilliant improviser. At the same time, once he had written his music down for others to play, he detested the superimposition of another taste. Moritz Karasowski, one of Chopin's students and also an early biographer whose Life and Letters of Chopin appeared in 1879, retells a story about the different styles of Chopin and Liszt.

One evening, when they were all assembled in the salon, Liszt played one of Chopin's nocturnes, to which he took the liberty of adding some embellishments. Chopin's delicate intellectual face, which still bore the traces of recent illness, looked disturbed; at last he could not control himself any longer, and in that tone of sangfroid which he sometimes assumed he said, "I beg you, my dear friend, when you do me the honor of playing my compositions, to play them as they are written or else not at all." "Play it yourself then," said Liszt, rising from the piano, rather piqued. "With pleasure," answered Chopin. . . . Then he began to improvise and played for nearly an hour. And what an improvisation it was! Description would be impossible, for the feelings awakened by Chopin's magic fingers are not transferable into words.

When he left the piano his audience were in tears; Liszt was deeply affected, and said to Chopin, as he embraced him, "Yes, my friend, you were right; works like yours ought not to be meddled with; other people's alterations only spoil them. You are a true poet." "Oh, it is nothing," returned Chopin, gaily, "We each have our own style."

To Chopin, a dandy in dress, style was more than the application of fioriture-flowery filigree-to ornament his melodic lines. His style, like his "somber yet richly figured waistcoats," was the outward expression of who he was. In leaving himself to posterity, he wanted to leave as little as possible to chance.