Emotionally a high-romantic, by conviction a classicist (he worshipped Bach, revered Beethoven, and played Mozart at his last Paris concert), temperamentally less a nationalist, more a urbane sophisticate, Chopin spent his first twenty formative years, over half his lifespan, around Warsaw.  Imbued from earliest childhood with feelings for the history and legacy, the joys and sufferings, the beauty and melancholy, the aristocracy and peasantry of his race, he was proud to be a Pole.  He found it easy and natural to think and express himself in terms of traditional Polish dance types - the imperial polonaise, the country mazurka, the southern krakowiak, the Mazovian kujawiak.  To the end of his days he spoke Polish.  As an emigré he followed Polish affairs and matters closely.  In Paris, in common with his compatriots, the poets Mickiewicz and Witwicki, he cherished his Polish identity for the spiritual anchorage it offered him.  He needed it for the well-being of his personality, for the comfort of his soul, for the memories it resurrected within him.  In Polish, after all, to paraphrase the late Jerzy Kosinski, he could always weep:  in French he could only ever but "register a state of sorrow".

    "How does one play Chopin?" a girl once asked Heinrich Neuhaus.  "Very, very well, my darling".  A calculated style of performance, appropriate for some nineteenth-century repertoire or, in the hands of certain pianists, for late Beethoven, fails completely in Chopin.  To begin to recreate Chopin's music you need to have a well-thought-out sense of structure allied with a refined quality and variety of pianism, together with a feeling for improvisation and rhythmic/temporal flexibility.  It is important, too,  to know that the dynamic form of any Chopin piece, in keeping with his fundamental classicism, will always be balanced around one climax, never two.

    "Look at these trees!" Liszt told one of his pupils, "the wind plays in the leaves, stirs up life among them, the tree remains the same.  That is Chopinesque rubato."  Rubato in Chopin is like pedalling:  you only apply it when you have to, intentionally never accidentally.  And you heed Chopin's advice that while you may deviate from an established tempo, while you may contract or expand the rhythmic pulse, you must always return to it - never arbitrarily by the end of a bar or phrase but only as and when syntaxically and punctuationally necessary.  According to his student, the Polish-Armenian Karol Mikuli, "Chopin's rubato possessed an unshakeable emotional logic.  It always justified itself by a strengthening or weakening melodic line, by exaggeration or affectation."  Almost without exception, the role of the left hand is critical.  Consistently (as an accompaniment) it has a function akin to that of the second violins or violas in a classical orchestra; it supports the whole and keeps the musical structure together.  Whatever listening, light-sensitive time-keeper of Chopin's world.  Rubato is an innate musical sense, not a nationalistic phenomenon.  Un-notated, it has nothing to do with the grammar or cadence of than languages general or particular.  Chopin's rubato was no more a manifestation of his Polishness than his Polishness was a consequence of his rubato.

    Chopin was an absolute and discreet master of pedalling:  the markings in his scores, however are often sufficient only to indicate the barest of possibilities.  The una corda pedal, which he is reputed to have used generously in his playing, is not indicated at all, in either his autographs of the first published editions.  Pedalling has to be intentional and decisive; like rubato, it cannot be the subject of whim.  Chopin rarely created dissonance by pedalling through pitch or harmony changes.  Unless a special effect or atmosphere is called for, unless a line is to be coloured or supported in a certain way, it is critical therefore, to pedal cleanly at all times.  The classical side of Chopin's nature demands this:  "use the pedal with the greatest economy," he is once said to have instructed Mikuli.

    In Chopin musical power is not synonymous with physical power.  Revealingly, you can contradict his loud dynamics, you can reverse his decibellic priorities, without damaging his intentions.  If Chopin's contemporaries are to be believed, he seldom played his music the same way twice.  According the the critic Alfred Hipkins, he would habitually vary his compositions from one performance to the next as his "mood of the moment" dictated, "a mood that charmed by its very waywardness; his playing resembled nothing so much as the tender, delicate tints seen in mother-of-pearl, and rendered apparently without the least effort."  And we have it on the authority of Sir Charles Hallé that when Chopin, at his final Paris recital (at the Salle Pleyel on Wednesday 16 February 1848), played his Barcarolle, he did so by changing the dynamics of bars 84ff. from forte crescendo to pianissimo, "but with such wonderful nuances, that one remained in doubt if this new reading were not preferable to the accustomed one."  In the parlance of computer software, Chopin's music, as an experience, is 'virtual', capable of being realised and understood in any number of ways, each different yet compatible.  Always challenging, Chopin's art, a galaxy of finely harmonised, finely tuned balances, is about suggestion and impression.  "I indicate," he told von Lenz in 1842, "it's up to the listener to complete the picture."

ATES ORGA & NIKOLAI DEMIDENKO ©1991

Home