“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 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 sang froid 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.”

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 punctil- iousness 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-Saëns, 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 Dubal 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.”

Mozart was one of Chopin’s two favorite composers; the other was Bach. As a student in Warsaw, Chopin had run out of piano teachers. He had studied instead with a violinist, Adalbert Zywny, and Bach. His dog-eared copy of the Well-Tempered Clavier appears in several Chopin anecdotes. Just as the chief innovation in Bach’s day—tuning the clavier to twelve equal halftones—inspired his pedagogical work of paired Preludes and Fugues in all twenty-four major and minor keys, so too the innovations in Chopin’s day inspired his twenty-four Preludes. Chopin rings changes to the harmonic world order of Bach’s noble forty-eight, enlarging the piano’s language and the pianist’s fluency in it. By nature innovatory but no revolutionary, he builds on rather than rejects the lessons of his teacher. Bach, in ordering his preludes and fugues, moved up the keyboard from C Major to C Minor to C# Major to C# Minor to D Major, and so forth. His order emphasized the ease with which one could now move chromatically with no mechanically caused dissonance and also firmly established each key in the hand for those “Musical Youth Desirous of Learning.” Chopin learned from Bach and slid out from under his shadow. In the Preludes, Chopin moved from major to relative minor, beginning with the move from C Major to A Minor and then around the circle of fifths from C—this journey takes you first to the keys with no sharps and flats, then to the keys with one sharp, two sharps, and so on up to six sharps, and down through six flats back to one flat. His pedagogical aim was to explore and expand moods and atmospheres elicited by more oblique tonal relationships. The Preludes are far from the lace and candelabra of the salons. Chopin’s focus is pure and unblinking, his concentration and invention intense.

Many of the Preludes are very short—just one page of music. A few are even shorter. But their landscape is marked with the euphoria and horror of the sublime. Prelude #7, andantino, in E Major, for example, is only sixteen measures long. It is of surpassing sweetness and gentleness, without a trace of false sentiment. Prelude #2, hardly longer at twenty-three bars, is almost lunar. For twenty measures, every note sounds bleakly wrong, the rhythms decay and stumble. Only then does the sole pedal marking blur the pain of aural vertigo. Officially, we’re in A Minor, but in fact only the final chord takes us there. Where are we? Chopin has fallen through dissonance into the abyss—only to curve upward in the third Prelude to a world of unostentatious grace.

In regard to the Preludes, it is temptingly easy to make a point about the Romantic love of fragments—that Chopin has given us preludes to nothing, preludes for no occasion. And I think there’s a lot of truth to that, although I do not go as far as Schumann who called them “ruins, individual eagle pinions.” But Chopin’s Preludes, for all their brevity, incorporate and compress the contrapuntal independence of voices he had learned from Bach’s fugues. Piano-writing after Bach had tended to emphasize melodic right-hand work at the expense of the left hand, which was often left to plod dutifully away at its Alberti bass, a kind of harmonic handyman. Chopin’s Preludes return independence to the hands in order to display a new kind of allusive dialogue between them. The final Prelude, in D Minor, might look on the page as if the left hand is merely marking time, but in fact the two hands are working freely against one another, allegro appassionato, in the most extraordinary way. It helps to have big hands, too. Besides their architecture and their raging and tender moods, the Preludes are filled with astonishing details. In Prelude #23 in F Major, in the next to last measure on the second 16th note in a run in the left hand, there comes the chime of a wholly unexpected and serendipitous E flat.

In having so much go on at any one time, Chopin has obviously raised the difficulty level of his pieces. Some of the easiest looking ones are so exposed that they can be the hardest to play with the confidence to let the music get on with itself. Quite a few of the Preludes in “easy keys” also have very manageable tempos—moderate (andante) to slow (lento) to very slow (largo)—and appeal to intermediate piano students for that reason alone. But they appeal to intermediate teenaged pianists for the additional reason that their deep engagement superficially mirrors back adolescent angst. The surprising harmonic progressions of the block chords in Prelude #20 in C Minor (originally only 9 measures long, now 13) tempted Barry Manilow to pen “Could It Be Magic” and a whole new generation of schoolgirl pianists to swoon. I hope we’ve all outgrown Manilow and grown into Chopin—I myself now prefer the mobile polyphonic chords of #9—but no matter how silly we were, we were at the same time definitely responding to something real in the piece, even if it’s hard to say what exactly that is. This is the Prelude about which Alfred Cortot wrote: “La tragique solennité du rythme de ce prélude est rendue plus impressionnante encore par une saisissante dégradation sonore evoquant le lent éloignement d’un cortège funèbre, vers l’angoissant mystère de l’inconnu.” (The tragic solemnity of this prelude’s rhythm is made even more moving by a piercing resonant shading off evoking the slow moving away of a funeral cortege toward the agonizing mysteries of the unknown.) Cortot’s piling on of adjectives is balanced by his knowledge that the Prelude must be played with an almost severe attention to rhythm—no messing about with arpeggiation or rubato “in the name of which we often commit so many crimes against the noble and supreme thought of Chopin.”

Chopin was a young man when he began to write the Preludes, but there was no self-indulgence in his music-making. These pieces are rigorous, severe, and disciplined. They are also—and here we are back to Bach again—purely pianistic, narratively abstract, as were almost all of his pieces. Liszt, by contrast, usually named his pieces, if not to fit an exact sequence of episodes, then at least to evoke some external associations in his audience. His transcendentally difficult etudes almost all have names: Mazeppa, Vision, Harmonies du soir, Wilde Jagd (Wild Hunt). Chopin’s pieces tend to have accrued names through the imaginings of others. Thus what Chopin wrote as Op. 25 #1, an Etude in A- flat Major, is now, thanks to Schumann’s description of Chopin’s playing, dubbed “The Aeolian Harp,” after the wind harp that so roman- tically seems to reflect the fugitive improvisations of Nature herself.

In Chopin’s atmospheric abstractions might lie another reason for our feelings of intimacy with him. For without his explicit suggestion that we think a particular thing, we can think anything. Take, for example, the case of Alfred Cortot. Cortot was a remarkable Chopin interpreter and, if possible, an even more remarkable teacher of Chopin’s music. His editions of Chopin’s works provide technical exercises and advice, offer interpretive suggestions, and even contain wisdom applicable to life off the piano bench. In a genuinely humble spirit, Cortot left a list of his private names for the Preludes. They are a hoot. Tiny #7 records, apparently, “Des souvenirs délicieux flottent comme un parfum à travers la mémoire . . .” (Delicious recollections drift like a perfume across the memory . . .) The next prelude, which Chopin marked molto agitato, becomes: “La neige tombe, le vent hurle, la tempête fait rage; mais en mon triste coeur, l’orage est plus terrible encore.” (The snow falls, the wind howls, the tempest is wild; but in my sad heart the storm is even more terrible.) In #19 he asks for “Des ailes, des ailes, pour m’enfuir vers vous, ô ma bien-aimée!” (Wings, wings, to fly to you, O my beloved!) He can be blunt, too. Prelude #4: “Sur une tombe.”

When I stop giggling, I find I have a sneaking sympathy for Cortot’s private naming even though this isn’t a habit I share and his descriptions don’t match whatever impressions I have of the pieces anyhow. Cortot is not demanding that Chopin get with the programme. Nor, although Freud and Oprah might think so, is he simplistically refashioning Chopin in the image of his own unconscious (horrid thought). No, it’s something more truly human—a hand outstretched to touch an unnameable thing. This desire too, I suspect, is what draws us to Chopin. Cortot was the first to record the complete cycle of Preludes in 1926, and he recorded them three more times up to the age of seventy-eight. Even Cortot—especially Cortot—never felt he had them quite right or pinned down. Listening to them on CD now, through hisses and pings and the flurries of impetuous wrong notes that were practically his trademark, we still feel Cortot—struggling with, embracing, digging through, wallowing in, striving for Chopin, “à la course a l’abîme” (his title for Prelude #16). And, above all, abyss or no, we still hear Chopin. As Hans von Bülow, another fine pianist and teacher of Chopin who named the Preludes, once remarked, “An interpreter should be the opposite of a grave digger. He should bring to light what is hidden and buried.”

And this brings me to Chopin’s Funeral, Benita Eisler’s recent biography of Chopin.¹ Her title at first made me fear that she came not to praise Chopin, but to bury him. But in fact the ground of Chopin scholarship lightly covers him here. Eisler’s bibliography includes such historical sources as George Sand’s Histoire de ma vie and Impressions et souvenirs as well as more recent works such as Charles Rosen’s The Romantic Generation, the wonderful Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger’s Chopin: Pianist and Teacher, As Seen by His Pupils, Jim Samson’s Music of Chopin, and the book which clearly influenced her the most, Jeffrey Kallberg’s Chopin at the Boundaries: Sex, History and Musical Genre.

Certainly, as an interpreter of Chopin’s music and life, she faced a daunting task. Indeed, writing about music at all is problematic. The most credible method is being technically specific—like the pianist Garrick Ohlsson on “Chopin Pedaling.” But the trade-off is audience. When Stephen Hawking was working on A Brief History of Time, he was told that every equation he included would cut sales in half. I don’t know what the ratio would be for including musical notation, but Eisler has none (Hawking included one: e=mc2). After that, it seems, writers on music and wine are mostly down to adjectives. In Chopin’s day, the popular adjectives of praise for him were “filigree,” “enchanting,” “faery.” But fashions change. Today, Eisler turns to the language of alienation and psychosis. Eisler’s Chopin is usually mute. “Exile was Chopin’s legacy,” and “[a]way from the piano, he remained inaudible to himself.” But in the Preludes he is fluent in the “vocabulary of terror.” Here you can judge if her description of Prelude #2 is to your taste:

Twenty-three bars long, the Prelude in A Minor . . . has received more critical scrutiny than any of the others. The piece has been called “disturbing and disturbed” and one of late romanticism’s “impossible objects.” Forged of disjunctions, the prelude’s harmonic clashes in the bass accompaniment, the melody’s ominous descents followed by silences, have seemed to expose an artist riven by oppositions: of body and spirit, classicism and romanticism, naked introspection bound by constraints of mathematical precision.

A serious amateur pianist, André Gide experienced the prelude as trauma—visceral and psychic. The music’s intensity of feeling assaulted him with “something close to physical terror,” he said. The repetitive rocking in the first two measures of unaccompanied bass mimes the compulsive back-and-forth motion characteristic of certain mental disorders.

In the library of the small town where I grew up, I remember these dusty volumes, high up, of biographies of yesteryear. There were volumes on courtesans and royal mistresses—Mesdames de Maintenon and de Pompadour, Nell Gwynn and Kitty Fisher, Perdita Robinson and Mrs. Jordan. There was a matched set called The Wits and Beaux of Society: Horace Walpole, Beau Brummel, Sydney Smith, the Duc de Saint-Simon, George Villiers, second duke of Buckingham. . . . The books were all clothes, parties, scandals, with a smattering of culture to make the snooping and snobbery acceptable. Eisler has read a lot about Chopin and George Sand, she is far from stupid and a talented writer, but her references to Foucault aside, her book is not much different.

1 CHOPIN’S FUNERAL, by Benita Eisler. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.00.

The Hudson Review Vol. LVI, No. 4 (Winter 2004)
Copyright © 2004 by The Hudson Review