Frederic Chopin, whose two hundredth birthday happened on March first, is the only great composer never to write an oratorio, cantata, an opera, a symphony, or chamber music - beyond an epigonic piano trio and the superb cello sonata - or much in the way of vocal music beyond the Polish songs op. 17. His music for piano and orchestra is restricted to his youth. He is a unique paradox: a major composer who chiefly wrote miniatures in dance forms for a solo instrument, the piano. He is said to have given the piano its soul.
Musicologists habitually point to his early influences - the long vocal lines found in the operas of Bellini, the concertos of Carl Maria von Weber or Hummel, the nocturnes of John Field - as if they explain him, and without accounting for his profound originality, for whatever he took, he transformed. The clarinet obbligatos put to flashy use in Weber's second piano concerto are interwoven with the greatest subtlety in the last movement of Chopin's E minor, and lift the piano part to another sphere with their buoyancy. The sentiments of Field's nocturnes are little better than those of a greeting card's, whereas Chopin's are comparable to the most searching poems of Leopardi or Baudelaire. As for the bel canto line said to be derived from Bellini, to sing any of Chopin's ''endless" melodies - or to play them on any other instrument than the piano - is to realize how very much to the piano they belong.
The Czech novelist Milan Kundera has criticized the two Chopin piano concertos for being diffuse in comparison with his mature work, but he wrote them before he was twenty, and they would not be played even to this day if they did not have depth as well as panache. The first mature work - the op.7 mazurkas, the op. 10 etudes - seems to distill the contents of volumes into moments, and elevate life to the condition of poetry. He very seldom failed this standard thereafter.
Which would be his most famous work? Probably the "Funeral March" sonata, considering the number of funerals at which it has been played, and the numberless times it has been parodied. Duke Ellington, for example, signs off with it in a sardonic way in various works such as the "Creole Love Call" throughout the '30's. Robert Schumann, among the first to proclaim Chopin a genius, didn't like "Funeral March" sonata much but did concede that people might dust it off now and then. He was wrong, of course: it has since raised as much dust as any tornado, being almost the first thing a young virtuoso of the romantic ilk will play to show his or her stuff in competitions. It is also a great, demented work, like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” one which is so much stranger than any of its parodies or imitators that it is best to just capitulate to it in slack-jawed wonder. But the etudes, the polonaises, the nocturnes, the waltzes and the preludes all contain works which will be recognizable to almost anyone from bad movies and long-forgotten commercials.
There is no wrong work to begin with, in my opinion, because one work will soon lead to another. The pianist William Kapell, assigned by his teacher, Rosina Llevine, to study one Chopin Mazurka over the weekend, ending up playing all of them, such is their allure. The Preludes op. 28, and the Etudes op. 10 and 25, are his greatest "cycles", where the deepest poetry is married to the wildest extravagance in the context of the most lapidary concision. There is the heroic world of the polonaises, the infinitely shaded inward world of the Nocturnes, which seem to combine in the Scherzos and Ballades. There F minor Fantasie, which tells a different story to everyone who hears it, and the op. 60 Barcarolle, an envoi to life, which for a moment seems to explain existence.
As may be imagined, supremacy in this repertoire is hotly contested by pianists, and has been since Chopin's death in 1847. A great deal of argument and connoisseurship attends this, mostly hinging on the use of rubato, or holding a note one place, hastening another note elsewhere to achieve a lilt or "swing." Just as many could leap high, but only Nijinski could leap into air and appear to hover, so the use of rubato in the hands of a master, a Rachmaninoff or Cortot, can seem to shape time and even halt Time, to contemplate Essence. It is a little thing but much. As a consequence, schools of pianists and schools of opinion have formed around such matters, each with its apostolic succession. From these come nostalgic reports of a Golden Era which we in the present have missed.
We do have recordings of a pupil of a Chopin pupil, Raphael Pugno, from 1907, not half as rhythmically wayward as descriptions of his practice would have it. There are also wonderful recordings from a little later by Josef Hoffmann, Ignatz Friedman, Moritz Rosenthal - who I adore - and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff's recording of the B minor, the "Funeral March" sonata, which was recorded almost eighty years ago, still amazes for its controlled bravura. Some say it is the greatest Chopin recording of them all. Others point to Alfred Cortot's Preludes, others still to Dinu Lipatti's Waltzes. There is a perennial tendency to fault the artists of the present day for flawless but heartless performances, in contrast with the poetry, fluency, and freedom of the past. This was said of the generation of Sofrinitsky and Neuhaus in the Soviet Union, and of Rubinstein and Horowitz in the west, and after them of the generation of Kapell and Lipatti. Personally, I think that an era such as our own which boasts Maria Joao Peres, Emmanuel Axe, Evgeny Kissin, Garrick Ohlsson, Maurizio Pollini, Krystian Zimermann, and Martha Argerich et al. looks pretty Golden to me.
The number of composers at one time or another under Chopin's sway would include such opposite personalities as Grieg and Scriabin, Rachmaninoff and Busoni, Debussy and Faure, Szymanowski and Bartok, Ligeti and John Corigliano. Every great composer for the piano will be haunted by Chopin at one time or another, whether Conlon Nancarrow or Thelonious Monk. The great Chopin pianist, Garrick Ohlsson, has also made a strong case for Chopin's deliberately unstable harmonies affecting Wagner, who was played Chopin's music by Lizst. He is, in short, a subtle but pervasive influence in modern music.
I can imagine no better an introduction to Chopin than Radio Chopin which is being produced by WDAV's Jennifer Foster, and which provides two hundred brief takes on Chopin and his music throughout this bicentennial year. It returns to the composer some of his own generous spirit, and provides insight for beginner and expert alike. Segments will appear throughout the year on WDAV, and the backlog can be found on its website, Radio Chopin.
In addition, there are some astonishing and even freaky performances to be viewed on Youtube. Horowitz's performance of the Funeral March at the Carter White House is somewhat like attending a dark mass. There is a performance of the "revolutionary” etude by Sviatoslav Richter whose virtuosity staggers. These are in the "sublime" department, but there is also the ridiculous, such as Lang Lang playing the "Black Key" etude with an orange. We may be glad that he didn't use a ripe tomato.