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3 Cellar Fusion: A musical extravaganza
From: 2010-03-23
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Musical Notes
My subject this month is Frederic Chopin, without whom all pianists (not to mention non-pianists who love piano music) would be so much the poorer they’d be virtually destitute! Chopin, who was born in Poland, but spent most of his short life in Paris, wrote almost solely for the instrument, which, if it enjoyed an early flowering in the late 18th century, burst into full bloom in the 19th.
Ask pianists what it is about Chopin that draws them to his music and you’ll probably get a hundred different answers – his original sense of harmony, his unbridled lyricism, his challenging, but always musical virtuosity. And the amazing thing is that if you listened to those pianists playing Chopin, they’d all play him differently – from the extrovertly flamboyant to the sensitively introspective – and who’s to say any of them would be wrong?
Listen to a range of interpretations of a single Chopin piece (the much-loved G minor Ballade, for example) and you’ll be surprised at how widely they vary. Each performer gets something different out of the music – that’s how malleable and multi-faceted it is – and I can’t think of another composer of whom that can be said to the same extent. There are limited ways to play Mozart or Beethoven or Schubert. There are many ways to play Chopin.
Chopin was born 200 years ago on March 1. In the 39 years he inhabited this planet he left around 200 piano pieces, and of those maybe about 80 are regularly played (and, of course, there are the two wonderful concertos, written when he was around 20). But all pianists worth their salt (and even ones who aren’t) seem to have an irrepressible urge to perform them, and that is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. As long as there are pianos and people to play them, there’ll be Chopin.
To re-phrase Schumann slightly: “Hats off, gentlemen; let’s remember a genius!”
Martin Hesse
Opus editor
