Frederic Chopin (jan 1, 1810 – jan 1, 1849)

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The Polish patriot Chopin spent most of his life in exile from his native country. After beginning his career as a virtuoso pianist, he settled in Paris at age twenty-one. He composed about two hundred piano works, mainly character pieces of various types. His nationalism was most overtly expressed in his polonaises and mazurkas, modeled on Polish dances, and in his ballades.


The Genius of Chopin
“Hats off, gentlemen, a genius!” —Schumann on Chopin (1831)
On his variations for piano and orchestra based on “La ci darem la mano” on Mozart’s Don Giovanni

Chopin was already proving a quite different breed of piano virtuoso from earlier performers. His music includes an amazing mixture of Beethovenian boldness, Schubertian inwardness, Bellinian lyricism, Lisztian dazzle, and a widely commented-on exotic color. He was a perceived outsider who spent almost his entire mature career very much on the inside, in the heart of European musical life: the lively Paris of the 1830s and 1840s.

Ludwig Rellstab, a powerful critic, didn’t like Chopin, saying that his variations were a vandalism of Mozart. “He claimed that an arrangement of this kind displayed the “primitive origins of the Slavonic nations,” calling attention to Chopin’s alien origin. Despite his French surname, he was a Pole, baptized as Fryderyk Franciszek Chopin near Warsaw, Poland. French expatriate father and cultured polish mother, who raised their children as Polish patriots.

While Polish patriotism burned brightly at the time, there was no such thing as Poland on the map. In 1795, the country had been swallowed up by its powerful neighbors: Russia, Prussia, and Austria. Although born in the Russian part and therefore legally a subject of the tsar, Chopin hardly viewed himself as a Russian. In a late review, Schumann wryly noted that if Tsar Nicholas I, who had put down a major Polish rebellion in 1831, “knew what a dangerous enemy threatened him in Chopin’s woks, he would forbid this music. Chopin’s works are guns buried in flowers.” Chopin thus became the first major European composer to be actively touted aboad as a nationalist. “And because this nationalism is in deep mourning,” Schumann wote, alluding to Poland’s tragic fate, “it attracts us all the more firmly to this thoughtful artist.”

It was mainly because the exiled Chopin’s nationalism was oppressed that Schumann noticed it in teh first place. Although the Romanticism to which Schumann so ardently subscribed was itself very much the product of German nationalism, he did not consider himself a nationalist. He thought that in order for music to realize its highest aim it had to be “unmarked” by any defining, and therefore delimiting, national character. For him, German music was unmarked. That is how one naturally tends to hear one’s own music, until one is made aware of the existence of other music. In this sense, he promoted an unwitting double standard (we now call it ethnocentrism) that actually helped perpetuate the oppression that Chopin’s Poland faced.

…Chopin himself may even have shared some of Schumann’s ambivalence about Chopin’s so-called “nationalist” works. He felt his Polish patriotism deeply and used his “exotic” origins to promote his career and his works in European society. But he also very consciously modeled his art on a wide variety of non-Polish examples, not just on Mozart. He was influenced by John Field’s piano music, owed a geat contrapuntal debt to Bach, assimilated Liszt’s transcendental technique, and borrowed his florid melodic style from Italian bel canto opera, especially those of Bellini.
Chopin was prodigy as fuck—published his first piece at age 7, and performed with an orchestra the next year.

In 1829 he made his foreign debut in Vienna, where he made a fateful discovery that people were more excited about his Polish music than his non-Polish music. Exoticism sells, especially when presented as nationalism. It povides opportunities, but, as we have already seen from Schumann’s ambivalent appreciation, it also limits and labels. Chopin’s talents as a pianist were different from the show-stopping bravura of a Paganini. In a letter from his first trip to Vienna he noted that “there is an almost unanimous opinion that I play too softly, or rather, too delicately for the public here. That is because they are accustomed to the drum-beating of thei own piano virtuosos…I would much rather the critics say I played too gently than too roughly. “

After returning to Warsaw from Vienna, he composed a pair of concertos (op. 11 and 21). “These pieces combined spakling pianism with exotic appeal: both their finales invoke the style of folk dances. In the First Concerto, the opening theme has the characteristic rhythm of a regal polonaise, the national dance of Poland. Second themes in both concertos employ the texture and florid ornamentation of Field’s dreamy nocturnes (night pieces), which Chopin would later develop into a major genre of his own.

After his debut in Paris on 1832, he became a favorite among the bourgeois social elite, who invited him to their salons, which made him the most sought-after piano teacher in the city. Henceforth Chopin was able to renounce the concert hall, generally shunning public performance. During this period, Chopin communicated with a larger audience through publication. He became friendly with Liszt, Berlioz, Meyerbeer, and Bellini, and with literary figures such as Heinrich Heine, Honore de Balzac, and Adam Mickiewicz. He met Delacroix

Belonging to rarefied social circles open to few musicians, Chopin cultivated a refined manner that was reflected directly in the style of both his performances and compositions. Many of his works began as improvisations that he later struggled to write down. Having withdrawn from public performance, he had no further need of the orchestra or indeed of any playing partners. After 1831, nearly all his works were piano solo; the only exceptions were a handful of songs to Polish texts and a cello sonata, one of his last compositions, written out of friendship with the cellist Auguste Franchomme.

Chopin was pleased that the public regarded him primarily as a creative artist rather than a virtuoso... (Liszt and Clara both championed his music). Play Chopin with rubato--he was one of the first to use the word "Rubato" as a performance direction, rather than indicating its effect with melodic ties and syncopations.

Chopin's piano works consist overwhelmingly of character pieces, including many nocturnes, etudes, preludes, ballades, rondos, scherzos, and impromptus. Dances: Polonaises, waltzes, mazurkas, written primarily after settling in Paris. To suggest the scope of Chopin's work, we will concentrate on a few extreme examples that show how and why he became such an emblematic figure of genius, Romantic suffering, artistic perfection, sickliness, nationalism, exoticism, and eventually universality.

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