The Chopin Collection

Chopin has always been something of a paradox. As one of the canon of ‘great composers’ he, unlike many of the others, is singular in writing almost exclusively for one medium – the piano. The salon associations of his music – the pianistic limp-wrist so to speak – concealed the iron backbone of his utterances. Put into perspective, the piano was merely a fashionable salon instrument at the beginning and into the middle of the 19th century. And Chopin had to earn his keep. If the grand ladies of the salons were prepared to swoon to the beauty of his music – and pay him respectably to do so – why would he refuse? While most composers entered through tradesmen’s doors, Chopin walked with countesses, princesses and the very milieu of Parisian high society. It does not mean that he enjoyed the atmosphere, the social flippancy, so to speak: ‘I am up to my neck in evening parties, concerts and dances, but they bore me to death …’ he wrote.

With the passing of time, the paradox recognised, Chopin has emerged as much less effete a composer. But the dichotomy always will – and should, perhaps – remain. His Mazurkas were described as ‘guns buried in roses’. Or take the phrase that so beautifully describes that combination of coolness and an underlying seething passion – ‘Rain of silvery fire’. ‘Rain’, ‘roses’, ‘fire’ – these objects clearly point to Chopin’s poetic muse, his ability to express narrative or verse through the medium of a solo instrument. It is thus so often that he is considered one of the keyboard’s most ‘natural’ writers.

But therein too lies a paradox. A great performance of Chopin may reveal a sense of struggle but rarely discloses the mechanical difficulty of his writing. For while Chopin, one of the great league of pianist-composers, knew the piano inside-out, he did so much more than his knuckle-breaking-obsessed predecessors, Moscheles and Hummel among them. For a start, he abhorred displays of digital virtuosity for their own sake. ‘Simplicity is everything’ he wrote. ‘After having exhausted all the difficulties, after having played immense quantities of notes, and more notes, then simplicity emerges with all its charm, like art’s final seal. Whoever wants to obtain this immediately will never achieve it: you can’t begin with the end. One has to have studied a lot, tremendously, to reach this goal; it’s no easy matter.’

As was to be expected, parallels were drawn between Chopin and his contemporaries, almost always in Chopin’s favour. ‘The difference between [Kalkbrenner] and Chopin was remarkable,’ wrote F.-Henry Peru, a student of both composer-pianists. ‘The latter never played his works twice with the same expression, and yet the result was always ideally beautiful, thanks to the ever-inspiration, powerful tender or sorrowful. He could have played the same piece twenty times in succession, and you would still listen with equal fascination.’ Or, more floridly, in the words of Alfred James Hipkins, a staff member of Broadwood pianos and Chopin’s preferred piano tuner: ‘Chopin never played his own compositions twice alike, but varied each according to the mood of the moment, a mood that charmed by its very waywardness; his playing resembled nothing so much as the tender delicate tints seen in mother-o’-pearl, and rendered apparently without the least effort.’

The composer Pauline Viardot speaks about the “spianato” (literally spinning) aspect of his writing: ‘[In Chopin’s works] when huge slurs extend over entire musical periods they indicate this spianato playing, without nuances or discontinuities in the rhythm – impossible for those whose hands are not graced with perfect suppleness.’ Given that so much of Chopin’s music has that ‘spun’ quality (its direct precedent, even inspiration, being the bel canto writing of Bellini and Donizetti) it is surprising that Chopin used the title only once in his oeuvre – for the Andante Spianato et Grande Polonaise. Apart from the three sonatas, the Andante Spianato is one of Chopin’s larger-scale works in what was, essentially, an output of short works. But short only in time span, for here again is another paradox: short in clock time, long-range in musical structure. Or as Schubert’s friend Holzapfel would reminisce about the composer, ‘He was a little man, but he was a giant’.

And expansive (if not gigantic) is indeed the scope of the Andante, which floats songfully over a rippling accompaniment. Again and again Chopin would urge his pupils to listen to the great opera stars of the day. ‘You have to sing if you wish to play,’ he would exhort.

Travelling through the 18th century with the works of J.S. Bach, Telemann, Mozart and Weber, the Polonaise found its own voice in the music of Chopin. He wrote seventeen of these – fifteen individual ones and two fused with other forms. The Polonaise-fantaisie, Op. 61 is really a fantasy on the polonaise idea and the Andante Spianato et Grande Polonaise is really a two-movement piece fused together with a bridge passage. It is proudly and fervently Polish.

Fusion of forms was not uncommon for Chopin. Although now regarded as belonging to the ‘set’ of four Impromptus (although these were written at different times), the Fantaisie-Impromptu, whether or not for its ‘I’m always chasing rainbows’ over-familiarity, is the most popular. Ironically, Chopin had for it such little regard that it remained unpublished during his lifetime. Its fluttery outer sections with tricky rhythmic coordination between the two hands enclose a rapturous centre.

And rapture really is the essence of the magnificent Barcarolle, Op. 60 – Chopin’s only tribute to Venetian waters. He struggled with the piece, working on it intermittently from the autumn of 1845 to the summer of 1846. It is speculative whether one can ‘hear’ the sense of struggle in the music inasmuch it is speculative to what extent a composer’s personal surroundings leave a mark on the music he writes at the time. Suffice to say that this is no picture of unruffled aquatic calm, and that the passion which seethes beneath its undulating rhythm nobly rides the piece to its ecstatic close.

Rarely did Chopin compose works on an ostinato and the little Berceuse, Op. 57 is one such – an iridescent set of variations on a constant tonic-dominant pattern, that ‘rain of silvery fire’.

If the sentiments of this piece are unashamedly showy, Chopin’s nocturnes are – and here again we have that paradox – pieces of the night in the sense of both calm and storm, at times in the single piece. The D-flat major Nocturne (Op. 27 No. 2) though, is serenely elegant.

The Ballades and Scherzos are yet further exemplifications of the ‘He was a little man, but he was a giant’ syndrome. A question mark hovers around the reason why Chopin chose the term ‘Scherzo’ for the four pieces he thus named (as opposed to, say, the scherzo in his third piano sonata). Apart from the occasional playful figuration that informs all four pieces, there is nothing coquettish about their mood or intent. The B-flat minor piece imbues elements of the hectoring (near the beginning), the ingratiating (development), heroic, sinister and excitable (coda) whirling the piece into a final shout of glory, all within a span of some ten minutes.

The Ballades are perhaps, considered as a set, less urgent if no less intense than the Scherzos. The fanciful stories built around them contemporaneously or posthumously were seldom by Chopin himself, who, for all his picturesque imagination, rarely felt the urge to attach pictorial images to his music. Completed in Paris in 1835, the first Ballade combines elements of sonata, variation and rondo. Its ‘legendenton’ (to steal an expression from Schumann’s Op. 17 Fantaisie) is implicit and its recapitulation reverses the order of the opening themes, rising in emotional temperature to a climax of passionate declamation.

Like the Ballades, Scherzos and Impromptus, the Waltzes punctuated different stages in Chopin’s life and career. They are seldom Waltzes for the ballroom – their whirl and passion too tiring, too intense perhaps for the casual dancer. Op. 34 No. 1 is one of Chopin’s most extrovert outings in this genre.

Would we call Chopin a romantic? With all the romantic illusions spun around his life (the leaking roof in Majorca where he composed the so-called ‘Raindrop’ Prelude; the affair with George Sand which scandalised Parisian society) and the soulful qualities of his music which we today identify as ‘romantic’, it wouldn’t seem an unreasonable epithet. Yet, in his day he found little empathy with other aspects of the Romantic movement, gravitating towards Mozart and Bach (cf. the intricate counterpoint in the first movement of the B minor sonata). To take that paradox even further, surely, he was for his time a modernist. The astonishing and mystifying finale of the B-flat minor Sonata, the enigmatic structure of the Polonaise-Fantaisie bear witness to this. Yet for all its temporal flexibility, its refusal to be stylistically pigeonholed, and, on the other hand, its powerful Polish sentiments, Chopin’s music speaks a universal voice.

Debussy – whose teacher Marmontel prepared an edition of his teacher Chopin’s works – is often credited with the dawn of modernity. But he repeatedly, both in and out of the context of this attribute, would look back over his shoulder to the Pole. ‘Chopin,’ he would say, ‘is the greatest of us all; for through the piano alone he discovered everything.’