FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN the 1981 Baldwin Recordings

Abbey Simon, Jorge Bolet and Earl Wild c.1979 FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN The 1981= Baldwin Recordings With the exception of three pieces–the Fantasie, the Ballade, and the Andante Spianato and Grand Polonaise Brillante–this recording features rel- atively brief works, some of them remarkably so, demonstrating to a refined degree the extent to which Frédéric Chopin was a master of the small form. This may be a function of the fact that, though he performed in public con- cert halls, Chopin most often performed for friends in intimate salons. Fantasie in F minor, Op. 49 (1841) The heroic Fantasie in F minor is one of Chopin’s largest and most epic works for solo piano. If its scale and scope are unusual for him, so is its form, being loose, extended, and improvisatory, and having numerous melodies. Unlike many romantics, Chopin’s music is generally not narrative or programmatic, and while it is personal, it remains pure art. Nevertheless, a story has been associated with the Fantasie. The composer and pianist Franz Liszt relates: The year is 1841 and Chopin is seated at the Pleyel grand piano in Madame George Sand’s salon in Nohant, France, where they spent – 2 – their summers. A knock is heard at the door and Madame Sand enters. With her are Liszt, Camille Pleyel, the wife of the piano manufacturer, and one or two other friends, perhaps the cellist Franchomme and the singer Pauline Viardot-Garcia. Some quarreling ensues, and then reconciliation. If Liszt’s tale is correct, this scene led to Chopin’s composition of the Fantasie. In any case, as Phillip Wilcher notes, “Unmistakably a narrative unfolds, but unlike the legendary and heroic tales depicted in [his] Ballades, it appears that here, Chopin is unveiling to us some compelling and climac- tic episode–an odyssey of cedar-pannelled events from his own life, for there is within its intrigue and brew a subtle subjectivity.” After a martial beginning, three groups of themes emerge (passion–prayer–defiance), each preceded by a kind of refrain made up of arpeggios rising upward and gradually speeding. James Huneker wrote: “It parades a formal beauty not disfigured by an excess of violence, either personal or patriotic, and its melodies, if restless by melancholy, are of surprising nobility and dramatic grandeur.” Waltz in D flat, Op. 64, no. 1 (1846-1847) The Waltz in D flat is the first of the opus 64 Trois Valses, and is known as the “minute” Waltz. One of Chopin’s biographers, Camille Bourniquel, tells that Chopin intended to depict a dog chasing its tail and originally named the piece “Petit chien”–little dog. One would never guess, from its sprightly and whirling character, that Chopin composed the work while his health was in decline and his relationship with George Sand was deteriorating. It was his publisher who coined the nickname “minute waltz,” intending the diminutive – 3 – “minute” to mean “small,” not “sixty seconds.” The charming work remains undiminished by its use in cartoons, or as the theme song for the BBC radio show Just a Minute, by an overt reference to it in a song by Barbra Streisand, or by its use as cell-phone ring tones. Waltz in A flat, Op. 64, no. 3 (1846-1847) In the mid-eighteenth century, the waltz appeared in southern Germany as a triple-meter folk dance “by couples in clogs or hobnailed boots on the lawn in front of the village inn or in the town square.” But early in the nineteenth century it moved into the cities and became popular among Vienna’s bourgeoisie. A waxed floor and light shoes and dress led to its faster pace and contributed to its strong beat on “one,” with the remaining long, smooth steps being lighter. Gary Lemco points out that the Waltz in A flat begins to expand into a polonaise, even a sonata-movement; then it turns and relinquishes its explosive possibilities into sweet dalliance. In the middle section its serpentining melody appears in the bass under an accompaniment in the right hand. This waltz, like all of Chopin’s later waltzes, requires a more mature means of expression than his more youthful waltzes, in order to avoid caricaturing them. Waltz in C-sharp minor, Op. 64, no. 2 (1846-1847) James Huneker declared that, of all the waltzes, this is “the most poet- ic of all. The first theme has never been excelled by Chopin for a species of veiled melancholy. It is a fascinating, lyrical sorrow.” And Theodor Kullak has written that “the psychologic motivation of the first theme in – 4 – the curving figure of the second does not relax the spell.” The waltzes provide the perfect occasion for the pianist to observe Chopin’s famed approach to rubato. As Liszt pointed out, the bass plays a steady, strict beat even as the melody enjoys a freedom of expression, with fluctuations of speed. “Look at these trees!” Liszt said, “The wind plays in the leaves [and] stirs up life among them, [while] the tree remains the same–that is chopinesque rubato.” Waltz in A flat (L’Adieu), Op. 69, no. 1 (1835) Chopin wrote this waltz in 1835 while courting Marie Wodzinska. He had fallen in love with the young and beautiful countess and had proposed marriage to her. As a poor musician, however, Chopin was not considered suitable marriage material by Marie’s parents, and he was rejected. His Waltz in A flat was given to Marie just before his departure for Paris. Marked Lento, this beautiful dance poem has often been called “L’Adieu.” The manuscript has the inscription “Pour Mlle Marie.” Gary Lemco writes, “The marcato in the middle section adds a nobility of character to the general tenor of ruminative nostalgia.” The work was published posthumously. Ballade No. 4 in F minor, Op. 52 (1842-1843) As noted above, Chopin was disinclined to write program music and he generally adhered to the principle of absolute music. But his ballades–a musical genre he invented, with apparent reference to the nineteenth-century literary genre of the same name–have elicited speculation of a link between his music and the poetry of Adam Mickiewicz. – 5 – As Michael L. Klein has noted, music can narrate only those plots whose story we have in advance. But absent such a plot, we can nevertheless outline the “dramatic sequence of emotional events [which] mirrors those emotions evoked by literary works.” Within its structure of sonata form combined with the varia- tion form, the Ballade in F minor has its own “narrative” of pastoral and tragic events. The piece is widely regarded as one of Chopin’s masterpieces, and one of the masterpieces of the entire nineteenth-century piano repertoire. Alfred Cortot wrote that in this piece “[Chopin’s] sublime imagination evinced a livelier feeling for beauty of form.” Though its key is F minor, an introductory section actually begins in the major. Nocturne in C-sharp minor, Op. Posth. The first nocturnes–night pieces–were written by the Irish pianist and composer John Field (1782-1837), from whom Chopin adopted both the idea and the name for the twenty-one examples he himself composed. Usually written in a languorous style, nocturnes characteristically have a simple expressive melody over an arpeggiated accompaniment. Even Chopin’s more mature and more complex nocturnes retain a certain textur- al simplicity in their melodies. The Nocturne in C-sharp minor, marked Lento con gran espressione, was discovered some time after Chopin’s death and was not published until 1895. But it was written while he was a very young man. It was featured in the 2002 Roman Polanski film The Pianist, the story of the survival of pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman during the Second World War. Szpilman performed the Nocturne on September 23, 1939 live on Warsaw radio as shells explod- – 6 – ed outside. A German bomb hit the station later that day, taking Polish Radio off the air. Nocturne in F, Op. 15, no. 1 (1830-1832) Jeffrey Kallberg has suggested that we should think of nocturnes less as a class or genre than as a communication between composer and audience. Indeed, no two of Chopin’s nocturnes are alike, and their rhythms often have less in common with each other than they do with other genres, such as bar- caroles, lullabies, marches, or hymns. While it is hard to know exactly what Chopin’s nocturnes communicated to his audiences, in German lands the nocturne had a precedent in the serenade, and in France the nocturne, almost invariably a vocal duet, had become a fixture of the Paris salon, pop- ularized by composers like Auguste Panséron and Antoine Romagnesi. This somewhat hesitant nocturne is abruptly interrupted by a furious middle section that gradually resolves again to the original melody. Nocturne in F-sharp major, Op. 15, no. 2 (1830-1832) It has often been noted that Chopin’s later nocturnes have some simi- larity to Bellini’s cavatinas (such as Casta diva from Norma) as well as to Rossini’s and Weber’s operatic melodies. Certainly they are among the most introspective and lyrical of all of Chopin’s works. By the time Chopin moved to Paris, in 1831, he had already reached full maturity as a composer. This brief nocturne is a confident and straightforward essay with high- ly ornamented melodies, and a middle section that ventures only briefly into a more dramatic realm. – 7 – Nocturne in B, Op. 32, no. 1 (1837) Chopin is said to have composed this piece while alone and depressed after the failure of his proposed marriage to Maria Wodzinska.

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