The Complete Works : Études

Abstract

Chopin's Ballades represents the highest art of music and are undoubtedly among his most important works. I remember an old book I read where the writers friend during a meeting with fellow lovers of Chopin's music spontaneously called out "All Beethoven's Sonatas for another Chopin Ballade". That should say it all. Chopin's first Ballade took him a great effort to produce and occupied him, on and off, for two years. In Chopin's Ballades, control and deployment of passion in their combination of immediacy and inner logic show us not once but repeatedly how art derives order from chaos. Chopin's chamber works are seldom performed but at least the trio in G-minor, labeled op.8, deserves more attention. It reveales his youths ambitions to compete with these days composers in every important genre. Soon he realised that his destiny was aimed for piano compositions and with the exceptions for the piano concertos, the chamber work listed here and the 4:th Sonata in op.65 (which I have put under Sonatas), Chopin composed solely for the piano. Chopin is the true inventor and patron of the "étude de concert" and what separates Chopin’s Études from similarly composers is that it was Chopin who first gave it a complete artistic form in which musical substance and technical difficulty coincide. The creative stimulus is the individually shaped hand, with its arrangement of muscles and tendons. In essence, it is the mechanical difficulty that directly produces the music, its charm and its pathos. Chopin's Impromptus have something of a reputation as "salon music," largely because the form itself seems to imply something improvised, transient, or insignificant. But when you play them like the greatest music in the world it's hard not to believe that the music actually is the greatest in the world, or in any event so fine as to make no difference. Chopin composed 59 Mazurkas (there seem to be at least another 2 unfinished sketches) and many of his other works of different genres are either inspired by the Mazurka or have parts of Mazurkas within them. Chopin did, of course, not invent the Mazurka form. However, it was he alone who put the Mazurka on the public stage and refined it into the highest art of music. In his Mazurkas, you get to know the very soul of Poland and Chopin never forgot his home land or the poor farmers singing the Mazurkas during the time of harvest. Chopin started his composing with a Polonaise and ended with a Mazurka, thus closing the circle. Among Chopin's miscellaneous works, mention should be made of the Variations brillantes on an air from an opera by Herold, Op.12, which shows how Chopin applied his art to the then popular custom of composing variations on opera themes. Arthur Loesser called it "a masterpiece in its way. A Bolero in C major, Op. 19, dates from 1833. Chopin turns this Spanish form into a rather Polish-sounding affair. The Tarantelle in A-flat, Op. 43, has spirit, though it lacks the native frenzy of the dance. Chopin was introduced by Josef Elsner to several composers and among them, we find John Field, who's invention (the Nocturne) initially inspired Chopin to compose for this genre. Though Field was the inventor, it is still Chopin who took the name and the general concept of a dreamy melody over a broken chord accompaniment, relying on liberal use of the sustain pedal and the offset of a contrasting middle section before a reprise of the opening material and made it famous on the general scene. Lyrical, poetical and dreaming substance before virtuostic artistics and reality. Chopin wrote two piano concertos and they have cost Chopin a lot of abuse claiming of Chopin's lack of composing for orchestra. The criticism has achieved the status of cliché� for the hords of comentators, most of them never studied his works in detail. Both of them, written before his 21:st birthday, are magnificent work from his young genious. To borrow a favourite phrase of Mozart's, they must seem to the listener "to flow like oil". These are the fundamental of piano concertos, virtuoso show-pieces of unprecedented pianistic resource, replete with exquisite shafts of melody and harmonic colouring and overflowing with emotional nuances from the subtle and poigant to the thrilling and fiery . Poland's most famous and patriotic dance bears a French name, as well as the Polonaises most famous composer, Chopin. Chopin got it from his father, the dance, in its modern manifestation, from its godmothers; three French princesses of the 17:th century who married successive Polish kings. Chopin's first composition was a Polonaise, his last a Mazurka, closing the circle and few have achieved greater or more lasting popularity than the mature Polonaises as his op.53 in A-flat major. Chopin's famous 24 preludes op.28, in each key in the circle of the 5:th, inspired by Bach's Preludes were at the time of publication something that many musicians proved sceptical to. "Preludes to what?" And still, these wonderful short miracles leave much to wonder about. Are they constructed to demonstrate a certain musical style, as with the Etudes focusing on a technical difficulty, or is the intention to use the preludes as a kind of a glossary of introductions to other works? Or maybe they should be performed in order, preceding only each other. Chopin left this great mystery to be figured out by ourselves or is it really possible that there is no pattern but just a set of wonderful small pieces, representing a certain mood or style? Chopin also wrote another longer Prelude and after his death, another two sketches were found published posthumously. Chopin composed five Rondos and they are less famous and seldom part of a pianists repertoire. Still they mark a significant mile stone for the development to maturity and any serious pianist interested in Chopin should play at least the Rondo a la Mazur in op.5, which is a remarkable mature work for a composer of the age 16. Chopin's Rondos are not strict in the Rondo form but rather develops the themes over the piece and blurs the different sections rather than having distinct ends. This is very typical for Chopin where he does not resolve the tension but instead, turns away from it and leaves it unresolved but for the very end where all energy built up is reduced to neutral. It was Beethoven who gave the Scherzo a place in the musical history books. Beethoven's Scherzos were conceived as parts of larger design, and they contain, on the whole, enough good-humoured energy to justify their label on etymologocal grounds (Scherzo is the Italian word for joke). Chopin's scherzos, on the other hand, are self-contained works, more notable for their altering intensity and lyricism than for any spirit of playfulness. Chopin wrote four Sonatas. Three for piano solo and one for piano and cello. Chopin's sonatas, and especially his opus 35 has been the target of much abuse or which can be traced to Schumann's remark that Chopin had here yoked together four of his maddest children under the same roof. The traditional Sonata form of A-B-A is in fact a very Germanish tradition and plays a relatively minor role in the development of music in France, Italy, Spain, Russia and much of the eatern Europe. Chopin composed all of his songs to poems by Polish writers and his contemporaries: Witwicki, Zaleski, Pol, Mickiewicz and Krasinski. He was able to meet almost all of them. The greatest number of songs (ten) were written to poems by an early-Romantic poet from Warsaw, Stefan Witwicki (1801-1847), from the collection Piosnki sielskie ('Idylls', 1830). Witwicki was a friend of the family. He had strong folkloric interests and backed Chopin's emphasis on the national. Chopin dedicated his Opus 41 Mazurkas to Witwicki. Also of the Warsaw period was the composer's close acquaintance with the soldier-poet Bohdan Zaleski (1802-1886), the author of three texts set to music by Chopin in the 'forties. Zaleski's folklore stylisations were based on Ukrainian songs and dances. Wincenty Pol (1807-1872), another freedom fighter of the November Uprising, published a collection of highly popular poems of the revolt, Songs of Janusz (1836). According to Fontana, Chopin composed music to ten or even twelve of these on their publication. Only one has survived: 'Leaves are falling' (Ópiew z mogiìy). Chopin composed two highly expressive love songs to poems by Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855), Poland's leading Romantic. One of these (Precz z moich oczu , 'Out of my sight') might have been the first text put to music by the composer. Chopin's last song (Z gór, gdzie dzwigali) was written to a poem by another great Polish Romantic, Zygmunt Krasinski (1812-1859); they loved the same woman, Delfina Potocka. Treating his songs as semi-private compositions, Chopin did not include them in any of his concerts, the more so as they were composed to Polish texts. It is quite possible that they could be heard at times in Warsaw, Dresden, and Paris salons, performed by some of his intimates: his sister Ludwika, Maria Wodzinska, Delfina Potocka. Fontana's publication, though belatedly, introduced the songs to the public, and they became a fixture in the repertoire of Polish singers. Others treated them with some reserve. It was by no means easy to sing them in Polish, while other languages - for the songs were translated and published in twelve other languages - made them lose their inimitable character. More successful on the concert platform were Liszt's piano transcriptions of six of them Chopin's variations are less famous and most of the listed works are published posthumous. Still, his first variation, op.2 (variations on "La ci darem la mano", from Mozart's Don Giovanni) was a major breakthrough when he visited Vienna and Robert Schumann wrote after his performance: "Hats off, gentlemen! A genius!" During the lifetime of Frederick Chopin (1810 – 1849), the Waltz became very popular, both as a dance and as saloon music. Chopin had poured scorn on the Waltz, writing home from Vienna. “They actually call Waltzes works”. And so eventually did he. His own Waltzes undoubtedly reached their finest flowering in Paris but he first discovered the form in Warsaw. He took special pains over the structure and continuity and the organic principle of developing variations lies in one way or the other behind most of them.