Frédéric Chopin

Born and raised in early 19th-century Poland, Frédéric Chopin, more than almost any other composer, set the direction for the development of late 19th- and early 20th-century piano music, establishing genres that were uniquely his own and creating a style of pianism that flowed from the essential character of the instrument. Pianos were by no means uniform in the early 19th century, and they were certainly very different from today’s concert grands—a fact that accounts for the recent interest in performing Chopin’s music on period instruments. It seems that Chopin’s own performing style on instruments from this period, as described by his contemporaries, was better suited to intimate social gatherings than to public concerts, and although his music takes its starting point from the popular concert music of his day, its highly distinctive idiom was greatly indebted to revered earlier masters, above all to Bach and Mozart.

Early Years: An Apprenticeship in Warsaw

Chopin was born near Warsaw to a French father and a Polish mother and was widely recognized as a child prodigy (“a second Mozart”) long before he began formal musical training at the Warsaw Conservatory. He remained in Warsaw until age 20, and his compositions from that period adhered to postclassical concert genres such as variations, fantasies, rondos, and concertos. Like other Polish composers of the time, he also wrote mazurkas and polonaises. Warsaw at this time was part of the Russian Kingdom of Poland, established by the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Although it was a vibrant cultural capital, there was mounting discontent with Russian rule, leading to a (failed) insurrection in 1830–31. Chopin was close to several of the artists and intellectuals who took part in the fighting, but he ultimately left Poland to make his way in Western Europe a week before the uprising broke out.

Middle Period: Paris and ‘The Finest Society’

When he settled in Paris in 1831, Chopin found himself among many Polish émigrés, mostly exiled in the wake of the insurrection, but he was also very quickly assimilated into what he called “the finest society” in Paris, and was soon in demand as a teacher and pianist. Finding his own voice as a composer meant in part abandoning familiar concert genres in favor of what are now considered his most well-known genres, including nocturnes, scherzos, and ballades. He also transformed existing genres, such as etudes and preludes, and gave new meaning to the waltz and to the trademark Polish dances—the mazurka and the polonaise. It is characteristic of his mature music that these different kinds of works often interpenetrate, so that a mazurka may play host to a nocturne, or a ballade to a waltz. As to keyboard style, Chopin created, more than any of his predecessors, a very particular brand of pianistic counterpoint that derived directly from the capacity of the piano to allow individual notes to emerge and recede from the texture at will (unlike the organ or harpsichord on which every key has the same volume).

Much of Chopin’s greatest music was composed during long summers spent at Nohant, the country home of his companion of some nine years, the novelist George Sand. The association with Sand was not the romantic idyll that has sometimes been imagined—in particular, their winter escapade in Majorca wreaked havoc on Chopin’s health—but the liaison did give him the financial security and familial stability that enabled him to devote extended periods to composition. It opened up a space within which some of the most exceptional piano music of the European tradition could come to fruition, music that has been a mainstay of piano repertory ever since, including epigrammatic forms (the 24 Preludes, Op. 28, 1835–39), epic forms (the two late piano sonatas, of which Op. 35, 1837–39, contains the famous Funeral March), and single-movement extended compositions such as the four scherzos (1833–43), the Op. 49 Fantasy (1841), and the four ballades (1831–42).

Chopin: Ballade in A-flat major for Piano, Op. 47

Final Years: Chopin in Britain

Chopin never really recovered from the breakup of his relationship with Sand in 1847, which she described as “a strange conclusion to nine years of exclusive friendship.” Before any semblance of normality could be restored in his life, moreover, politics intervened in the shape of the February Revolution of 1848. In its aftermath, and in the company of other exiles from France, Chopin found himself in London, giving concerts at several stately homes, and even in Scotland, where the social rounds proved exceptionally tiring. By then his consumption had reached an advanced stage, and he died, shortly after returning to Paris, in October 1849.

Legacy

Aside from his widespread influence on piano composition, we might specify three particular fields on which Chopin left his mark. Russian composers of the late 19th century, from Glinka onward, took his mazurkas in particular as models for the development of a Russian national school rooted in traditional (folk) music, which in turn influenced the rise of musical nationalism more generally. After Chopin’s death, he was also much promoted in his second homeland of Paris and was a major influence on the development of modern French music at the turn of the 20th century—notably on the piano music of Fauré, Debussy, and Ravel. Finally, in the second half of the 20th century and beyond, he became something of a cult figure in East Asia, where the piano has been widely regarded as a powerful symbol of modernity.

Watching and Listening

The three piano pieces in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center’s Digital Archives include two pieces from Chopin’s early years in Paris and one late work. Listening to the Mazurka Op. 17, No. 4 (1832–33), we soon appreciate just how stylized Chopin’s treatment of a folk dance could be, for this is an expressive, nocturne-like piece, with the folk model foregrounded only in its trio. As in all four ballades, the first (Op. 23) follows the broad outlines of a sonata movement, but with the difference that its themes, deriving from popular genres such as the waltz and the barcarolle, were of a kind seldom found in actual sonatas. The Berceuse, Op. 57 (1843–44), a product of his later years, likewise adopts a popular genre, subjecting it to a chain of variations over a repeated ground, or bass-line, somewhat in the manner of baroque divisions—a method of variation in which note durations are broken into smaller durations.

Chopin is so insolubly connected to the piano that it can sometimes come as a surprise to learn that he also composed for other instrumentations. There are 17 Polish songs, for example, and there are also two chamber works heard in the CMS archive. Of these, the Piano Trio, Op. 8 (1828–29) is a student composition, but one of considerable weight. Its final movement is a rondo, whose theme is based on yet another Polish dance, the krakowiak. Of a different order altogether is the Cello Sonata, Op. 65, Chopin’s last extended composition and one that cost him much effort, as its sketches indicate. It stands somewhat apart from what we usually understand as Chopin’s musical style but remains one of the great 19th-century cello sonatas. One tantalizing thought: in the papers of Auguste Franchomme, the cellist for whom Chopin wrote the cello sonata, there is a brief fragment of music for violin and piano. Might a violin sonata have been Chopin’s next major work?

Chopin: Sonata in G minor for Cello and Piano, Op. 65

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