In Search of Chopin

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2004 by Mullen, Alexandra

It's not surprising that Berlioz singled out the Mazurkas as music deeply marked with Chopin's personality. The last sheet of music to emerge from Chopin's hands before he died was a mazurka. And in the Mazurkas, we can still see the marks of Chopin's hands. As the melodic line reappears, he fastidiously builds in the illusion of improvisation. A simple eighth-note turn might become dotted in its next appearance, or the notes might be separated by a sixteenth rest, adding a little air and lift. A fioritura might first fit eighteen notes in the space, then twenty-three, as the piece gathers impetuous momentum. A previously neutral note might gain an accent or portamento stress as the mood momentarily wakens into passion or leans into languor. Chopin's scribal punctiliousness transmits a style of spontaneity.

This was no easy task, because the piano itself was changing, its customs and language in flux. Mechanically, the piano's capacities for expressiveness increased, through more powerful and even action, damper pedals, and a full seven octaves. The piano itself could now generate a greater range of effects, shimmering timbres, singing legatos, striking brilliance. Technically, piano-playing began to shift from the digital emphasis growing out of light-actioned clavichords and harpsichords to working with the strength and flexibility of full arms and even back. Saint-Saens, who was born in 1835 but lived until 1921, remembered the physical changes required by the newly developing piano repertoire. Liszt's pieces, he recalled, "seemed impossible to play, except by him, and such they were if you recall the old method which prescribed complete immobility, elbows tucked into the body and all action of the muscles limited to fingers and forearm." Artistically, all heaven and hell seemed to break loose.

Liszt and Thalberg were the emperors of the new piano performing stage: "Thalberg is the best pianist in the world; Liszt is the only one." But it is Chopin's compositional innovations, even more than Liszt's and Thalberg's pyrotechnics, that affect piano playing to this day. Almost everything he wrote still holds a central place in the piano repertoire, and a not insignificant proportion of his work is playable by averagely skilled amateurs, of whom I am a somewhat sheepish member. When students first learn the language of Romantic pianism, Chopin, not Liszt or even Schumann, is the Muttersprache. Surely this physical acquaintance with his music also accounts for some of the intimacy we feel. Most of his piano writing, however, looks too scary for amateurs even to attempt to read through. Thus I will now have to turn to the authority of David Dubai to inform you that Chopin's very, very difficult Etudes are true teaching pieces, "a summary of Chopin's enlarged vision of piano technique. . . . They are a challenge for every generation of pianists, and few can feel equally comfortable in all. They are small in form; as each develops a single technical idea, they demand an enormous endurance, while musically they are as exposed as Mozartian writing."